@oldtimer you are contradicting yourself. You like the American way but diss it in the same post.
I wish somebody could tell me what domain companies - are you meaning registries or registrars or both - are adding value-wise to he world. I'd add the term "on balance", because I can see pluses and minuses.
Also, please don't confuse capitalism with corporatism. Those boardrooms are corporate. They stultify invention and advancement, the antithesis of the (sadly misguided) ideal of capitalism which is supposed to promote innovation and the public good.
It never has. All research shows technological advance is publicly, not privately, funded. In the case of technology, most of it by the USA military establishment. The web. Everything Apple has ever "invented". The Google algorithm. Just a very few instances of what has been funded by the USA public and not, as the propaganda claims, those businesses. YOU, USA citizens, own the G algorythm. YOU, USA citizens, paid for it. $billions if not $trillions. But your "representatives" just handed it over without so much as a by your leave. Same with touch screen technology and everything else Apple has been granted a patent for. To mention just two.
Still, all of that is way off track for what NamePros and domaining is all about. It simply illustrates that rosy tinted spectacles can't hide the out and out speculative nature of what we are all doing. I'm not saying there is any harm in that. I'm simply saying don't delude yourselves into thinking you have some high moral ground to stand on. You don't.