I agree with @jrockway below. There is no point in retaining TLDs the way are now. The original idea of TLDs were to have separate namespaces. For example, apple.com is the company apple and apple.fruit, may be a fruit seller. This never worked though. At the end, the companies ended up having to register all the TLDs or someone else would get apple.dong and pretend to be related to apple. ICANN decided to use the opportunity for money grab and started releasing new TLDs every now and then. It makes all sense to get rid of usage of TLDs as they are today. If apple is <any subdomain>.apple, that's it. People would know that apple.dong is something related to dong. It might sound to be far fetched, but it is not. Once people see the flooding of TLDs (like handshake TLDs which are easily and cheaply available to general public on Namebase (namebase.io) or Bob wallet(Bob wallet.io)) and when they realize TLDs are the new equivalent of .coms, they would realize that it's just the TLDs that matter for auth aspect and the subdomains are more functional within the company (like mail.google and chat.google) The only people to lose are the scammers and ICANN.