It's simple, really. A domain name like poetry.com is as accessible to the average person as it is to a company. A TLD on the other hand is something you need to take out a mortgage to own.

The difference is in the democracy of it all. Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans. Scrounge up ten bucks and a web connection and it's yours. TLDs aren't even close. It's a total plutocracy and ICANN seems totally unapologetic about it while the companies snatching them up look ridiculous when they put a line in their proposal about how their ownership of some random word as a TLD is in our, the users, best interest.

How can anyone overlook that? It's practically beating us over the head, taunting us.