Re: Money... That's what they want....
"I was happy when all we had was .com .co.uk .org and .net"
Sadly that only works if everyone agrees to abide by US law, and most people don't have that option. Even within the .com domain, most sites probably aren't exposed to the ire of a US court to any extent beyond losing their domain registration and that only costs them a few dollars. ".com" might as well be ".anon" for legal purposes.
The current crop of gTLDs are, indeed, a complete waste of time. However, the country code TLDs could be turned into something useful if the rules were changed that you could only have foo.{cc} if you set up in {cc} as a legally liable entity with a cash pile appropriate to your parent organisation's size. (Ideally, we'd align IPv6 address ranges on the same lines.) End-users could then assume that anything on *.{cc} obeyed "local law" and that the local entity could be forced by a local court to pay out a sensible amount in damages if they lost a case. Politicians could pass laws applying to anyone with a {cc} domain and have a reasonable chance of enforcing them. End-users could then choose to filter their internet usage by {cc}.
This doesn't even need international agreement, since the registrars for the {cc} domains generally already are within the legal jurisdiction in question. Anyone who doesn't want to live by the new rules is free to "emigrate" by moving their operation to a new domain name.
This would leave .com, .org, etc. to those who want to be part of the US. I'm fine with that. They, in turn, would have to be "fine" with consumers in every other country on Earth preferring to deal with a site under the local {cc}. The big multinationals seem to have those registrations already, so I doubt it would be a problem.
Given that all of us are subject to some legal system, it is frankly amazing that the internet has become so pervasive without any serious effort to partition it into legally coherent sections. All we've had so far are (local) politicians queuing up to call for a (worldwide) ban on stuff they don't like. It's almost as though humanity at the end of the 20th century saw the possiblity of creating something that would by-pass all existing legal restrictions and everyone thought: "Yeah, let's move all our social and commercial lives over there. Who needs laws anyway?".