Ok, first of all, how is it a monopoly if you just bought the thing? That's like saying facebook has a monopoly over the domain name facebook.com.

Second, how is using it... abusing it?

There's a reasonable argument to be made that ICANN should not have sold an extremely desirable TLD like .dev to a company intending to use it internally rather than permitting open sale.

Not to mention that it was well-known to be commonly used for internal domains at other organizations, and they then intentionally acted to break everyone's internal workflows on a global scale. It'd be kind of like if ICANN went and sold .local (which Windows servers default to as internal domains.) The other correct option for ICANN was just to refuse to sell .dev and mark it as an internal use only TLD.

The way we allocate second level domains is already terrible (see also domain parking/domain squatting), why would I be okay with someone just throwing money at ICANN to get a bunch of generic top level ones too?

ICANN should carefully consider each gTLD application but instead they like money so much they'll sell anything to anyone so long as they pay.

Get ready for .fart.

> Ok, first of all, how is it a monopoly if you just bought the thing?

In general, monopolies are owned, and may be bought and sold.