with all due respect, I say bananas.

"good" domain names are not terribly difficult to come by. Good branding, can be though. Hulu, Google, Yahoo, Comcast are all fairly meaningless words, until they were branded as such. It may be true that for someone that can't afford the buy a ~$100-$5000 domain from a broker may have to look/think harder to find a suitable domain, it is not THAT hard.

Country codes showed us that average users don't want other TLDs, unless they are domain hacks and can be spoken easily (.ly, .it, etc). They almost always prefer the .com, unless they can get a translated version using their own country code (google.tld, etc).

This is purely to raise money for ICANN. I understand they need money, and I understand they can do this, it just feels...bleh.