That's the way it's been since the earliest days of the World Wide Web. You can read the history of .com here https://icannwiki.org/.com , but the TL;DR is that it was run by a private company as early as 1991, then acquired by Network Solutions in 1993, which was acquired by Verisign in 2000 who still run it to this day. .net has a similar history. I don't see any a priori reason why profit-driven companies should be excluded, and as you point out, there are plenty of non-profit registry operators to choose from (including Public Interest Registry, the non-profit that runs .org), if you care strongly about that.
denic is a ccTLD operator, whereas what we're discussing here are all gTLDs.
My issue is that there’s corporations squatting on TLDs, which no normal person can afford.
Not only does this increase the advantages an established corporation can have over individuals or startups, it also ends up with Google literally domainsquatting entire TLDs just because they can.
And there’s no registrar above them that could simply revoke their domains for squatting.
And de is as much a ccTLD as .io – it’s not really the actual case anymore. DE is one of the largest domains overall, even counting gTLDs.
And we could simply solve this – use the power of democracy (aka, governments) to force TLD ownership to be entirely non-profit.
I don’t want to see large corporations buy massive amounts of TLDs (as google has done) and then sit on them. In addition to the antitrust issues that can appear with this.
How should a startup ever be able to compete in a reasonable timeframe with Google if we allow these corporations to grow ever further, and gain ever more power?
I can't really comment on the rest of it, for obvious reasons, but this part is not accurate:
> And de is as much a ccTLD as .io – it’s not really the actual case anymore.
.de is clearly still the ccTLD for Germany. It's not at all like the situation of .io, which is run by a British company as, effectively, a two-letter generic TLD that has nothing to do with the actual Indian Ocean territories. .de clearly has a lot to do with Germany, including being widely used there (but not anywhere else), and also being run by denic, a German company headquartered in Frankfurt. I was just in Frankfurt last week talking with a bunch of denic people, actually. They absolutely do consider it a country code TLD, proudly and unapologetically.
denic is a ccTLD operator, whereas what we're discussing here are all gTLDs.