Both forms of Internet naming semantics make sense to me. Unfortunately, we've never reached any consensus or understanding at all about which apply where, or how to tell. That leaves us in this kind of crummy middle ground where different TLDs do or don't assert things about their registrants, to a degree that can change over time, and there's not an easy way to check. (You could read the NIC web site, if it's up-to-date, if it's in a language you speak, and if its stated policies actually correspond to its practices...)
It's not surprising at all that people's intuitions about a particular TLD would diverge. But it's sad, because it means the Internet naming system isn't working well in terms of the function of letting users know what particular names mean.
It's not crazy to imagine either a TLD that says "despite any possible appearances to the contrary, this is a first-come-first-served namespace in which names have no extrinsic meaning at all" or a TLD that says "this TLD is owned by entity X, and subdomains, like subdomains of a corporate or governmental network, are only given to persons with an appropriate relationship with entity X, and only during the term of that relationship". (Maybe even a TLD that says "notionally this TLD is about topic or group Y, but our rules about what that means are kind of idiosyncratic".) (But if there are TLDs in all these categories in the same DNS, both registrants and Internet users are probably going to be unsure which is which, as well as exactly what the TLDs in the third group "really" mean.)
