Rationale behind domain name system

Simon’s “posting”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/05/22/tbl on Tim Berners Lee’s “document”:http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD about TLD(Top level Domains) got me thinking: how did the current system come about?

I mean, why not a system similar to Usenet:

bc. com.uk.mapledesign
com.int.amazon
org.int.sendcard

Maybe extended further:

bc. com.uk.mapledesign.www
com.uk.mapledesign.ftp
com.uk.mapledesign.mail

and so on.

That seems to provide a much more structured way of finding what you want. In a way it’s like having the “ODP”:http://www.dmoz.org in the domain name (although not to such an extreme level). There’s still the problem of trademarks. Here my take is: “If the company has a registered trademark in that country they are eligible to claim the domain; otherwise anyone else can take it.” Those that have the domain before someone registers the trademark in their country cannot have it taken from them - they could be bought out. Yeah, still problems, but it seems fair to me
I tried “Google”:http://www.google.com to find how the current system came about but had no luck - can anyone enlighten me?

[Credit: my thoughts on alternative organisation of domain names were inspired by something I read in "Tim Bray's":http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ site many moons ago - and can't find now]