Re:This is becoming ridiculous (Score 2, Insightful)

But that can only be done when people stop treating .com as a first choice and everything else as sub-standard.

Wait, there's more than .com? Where have I been? ;-)

Seriously though, non-national domain names are needed for multinational entities, and .com, .net, .org... make perfect sense for them. It would not very nice for web users have to choose between somecompany.us | somecompany.za | somecompany.fr if they had facilities in USA, South Africa, and France.