That is a ridiculous statement. My first name is Travis. I am not the owner of https://travis.io/ but somehow we coexist. That's because even though the name clearly exists, no one owns it. But this guy owns the domain because he registered it first. By your logic this would come down to who the oldest person with the name is. It sounds stupid in this context because it is. There is no principal here, just a money grab by some South American countries who had no interest in the domain until someone rich registered it. If it was a matter of principal they would have objected when Bezos registered amazon.com, but he wasn't a billionaire then, so they didn't care.
This is increasingly less tru as TLD's like .amazon are being given out. There's no reason that a or b in format a.b is more important, other than the fact that the arbitrary convention exists that a can be anything but b can only be one of a few choices.
Yay... let's put a price tag on everything! Let "the market" decide. What could we also sell... let's see: Air, water, children... the highest (richest?) bidder decides.
Especially if he got rich by exploiting workers (through low wages and bad working conditions, like wearing diapers) and exploiting state regulations (through tax evasion).
There's the problem. The name exists, so somebody owns it.
Who has more right to it? The countries with a big river with that name running through it, or the ecommerce startup from really not that long ago?