They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CsN6rbonMo is basically perfectly accurate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 (we need .egg and .muffin)