People seem to be missing the point, other than for a few big companies (such as ibm, cisco etc) ICANN aren't expecting or wanting consumers to be buying their own Top level domain name, they are expecting registras to buy them and then resell them. The domain name isn't any use to you if you also don't have the domain name servers to host them in a reliable manner. The higher the price the better as it limits the number of top level domains and the impact they have on the infrastructure.