When has DNS ever been democratic? Since day one e.g. the .GOV and .EDU TLDs have been used only for educational institutions in the US, whose portion of the word population is on the order of 5%.

There's surely a lot of sucky things about the new arrangement where big companies can buy TLDs, but it's much more democratic for the rest of the 95% of humanity than when the US had de-facto control of the system. Just look at how many new TLDs are e.g. owned by Chinese companies.