I think it would be useful if the companies buying the TLDs were not allowed to buy more than 100 or so of 2nd level domains within that TLD and forced the pric

I think it would be useful if the companies buying the TLDs were not allowed to buy more than 100 or so of 2nd level domains within that TLD and forced the price to be something non-trivial like $30. Then owning all the 2nd level domains would be prohibitively expensive and would actually be useful for people coming up with a good domain name.