Even with that fixed, people will argue why do other countries' have to have their country prefix? Shouldn't a US website be e.g. us.com.walmart to be fair? And what do you do with multi-nationals, de.com.mercedesbenz and us.com.mercedesbenz? com.mercedesbenz/de (and /us accordingly?). Or de.com.mercedesbenz/us (as well as /de) because it's a German company?

Face it, it's legacy, and just like QWERTY, it's never going to be fixed.

I see TV ads where the narrator just says "Search for $BRAND_NAME" expecting you to google it, AOL keywords all over again.