This is a completely bogus argument. TLDs are a license to print money. If a company like McDonalds wants to protect its trademark, they have to buy up the domains in each TLD. Multiply that times an insane number of new TLDs and you have the makings for a great expense for companies, and great profit for the "owners" of the TLD.
What is the point of this garbage anyway? I don't recall a groundswell of demands from anyone but domain registrars (who are the ones who stand to profit handsomely from this), for new TLDs. I really don't see the need for internet namespace to be more complex and confusing than it is now, unless you want to make scammers's lives easier.
One thing that I'm going to start taking a look at is a way to filter my DNS queries so that my resolver will only allow specified TLDs. Personally, I have no desire to go to any domain other than those which we used to call the 'free world'. I realize that won't solve all associated potential problems, but it would be a start. It should be fairly easy to do through dnsmasq or something similar. You should be able to 'whitelist' domains/TLDs that you want to be able to use and 'blacklist' those that are problematic.
From /etc/dnsmasq.conf:
# Never forward plain names (without a dot or domain part)
# domain-needed
I've been using this program for some time to speed DNS queries on my local workstation. After poking through the config file, I see that it has a lot more power than I thought. I bet it would be possible to make it block TLDs like I was metioning above. Will have to look into it for sure.