This is the case for all new gTLDs. .pro to .xyz to . accountant, the registry can put any price, be it zero or a million dollars.
Imagine a world where whomever has the most money can control your brand. What happens when McDonalds buys the Burger King brand because BK was priced out?
.com, .org, and .net are long standing shared resources that should not have unlimited prices. They should be capped forever.
It will be more site the kind of wikileaks that could get effectively removed without having to go legal routes. Just have your friends price them out of their domains. Nobody needs to even buy the domains, they just need to be expensive enough to stay unused.
There are ways to circumvent DNS so long as IP works (I mean the "Internet Protocol suite"[1], "TCP/IP", the real-world implementation of OSI if you've been taught that theoretical model).
Maybe a 'public darknet' (a parallel "white net" really, nothing shady about it, by "darknet" I refer to how it works technically[2]) wherein we don't care about a global DNS, and use links + light VPNs to browse internal (firewalled) resources — I'd wager it's doable using tokens to auto-validate public VPN access like we'd greenlight an SSL connection, essentially, probably some 3-way handshake. The whole thing would be public, just circumventing DNS/TLD hierarchy, so indexes etc. would work just the same (it doesn't break Google Search).
A neat bonus is that companies could use whatever name scheme they like, "store.sony" would work, and even collisions could be resolvable through aliases.
Whatever works but if current DNS/TLD's become a corrupted theft, the world will definitely move away from it — and we don't exactly look back for these major PITA standards.