Wouldn't you use this argument with everything? "If it's for the better, it'd be free"
To each their own opinion, it'll be one that's easy to see the effects of in a few years to come.
First, not always. Some things for the better should be more expensive. For example, cigarettes are bad for health and should be taxed higher.
Price is arguably the most powerful economic incentive or disincentive. In a very basic scheme, if you're trying to incentivize something, you do so by lowering the price. If you want to disincentivize something, you raise the price.
Here, GTLDs accomplish one thing very plainly: they raise the cost of setting up and maintaining a proper web presence. We don't need to wait to see this, it's already apparent. Higher cost = a disincentive to have a web presence. Right now, most web designed advise a company to purchase the company name in most logical TLDs (.com, .net, .cc, .us, etc.) and some logical misspelling as well. Further, purchase the major brands the company owns in the same way. So today, a responsible company would own dozens of domain names, depending on how many brands they market, all redirecting to their main site. This is costly. With GTLDs, that cost grows exponentially.
I'm all for opening up more available domains, making things easier for small businesses, and improving the web. However, this is plainly only a cash-grab by registration companies and nothing else. What happens when we run out of logical GTLDs? Will they add another layer and start charging for that?
http://www.Widgets.camera.digital ? Not only does this resemble the old geocities structure, it also has no end.
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Forgive me for the ignorant question but I've always wondered why we can't get rid of urls altogether. Urls just point to a set of numbers that represent your web address anyway, is that right? If so, can't we just use search engines to find what you want and the name is irrelevant? I'm honestly asking because I don't know how all of this works but it just seems to me that the site name is not as important, I visit plenty of sites where I have no idea what the web address actually is I just google it.
Does that make sense?
This makes more sense than GTLDs. The only issue I can see if how would you communicate (orally, for example) to someone how to get to a site that doesn't want to be found using search engines? For example, a site that wants to be spread using word-of-mouth, but not be searchable?
Introducing 
