No. com/net/info have always been US domain names from the beginning. It's a big reason why others were created. When you run a .com, you are running a US domain name.
There are no international domains -- can you imagine how disastrously messy that would be?
Domain names are under the jurisdiction of one country. It just so happens the US domain names are popular, but that certainly doesn't mean you are forced to use them.
"com/net/info have always been US domain names from the beginning" - Citation? And how come there is a ".us" TLD?
It may seem that way from where you sit (USA by any chance?), but I think you'll find the rest of the world sees com/net/org as transcending countries, hence their value.
"The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The domain was administered by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), however the department contracted the domain maintenance to SRI International. SRI created DDN-NIC, also known as SRI-NIC, or simply the NIC (Network Information Center),[3] then accessible online with the domain name nic.ddn.mil. Beginning October 1, 1991, an operations contract was awarded to Government Systems Inc. (GSI), which sub-contracted it to Network Solutions Inc. (NSI).[4]"
> And how come there is a ".us" TLD?
Because every country gets a two letter country code TLD.
> It may seem that way from where you sit (USA by any chance?), but I think you'll find the rest of the world sees com/net/org as transcending countries, hence their value.
Just because you see certain TLDs as transcending countries doesn't mean that they actually do.
Besides, having jursdiction over a TLD is necessary to deal with sites that have servers in multiple countries. How else do you handle jurisdiction for a website with multiple servers in multiple countries and that advertises to multiple countries, some of which don't have a server inside that country's border?
Isn't that like giving the country that invented the telegraph jurisdiction over all undersea cables wherever they are installed?