Owning a TLD shouldn't cost a penny, in fact as it goes the structure of the internet as everybody knows it today goes completely against the outset and format it was supposed to take and in fact did take when it was first realised.
The centralisation of domain name servers was actually never supposed to happen and is an abomination to internet and contrary to the way the internet was supposed work. To be connected by a peer to peer hop system. This system worked well in the early days however as people became a little more security concious things took a turn for the worse and thus domain name servers came into existence.
However, With some careful consideration and practical security measures, it is entirely possible to take the internet back to its roots especially with the massive leaps and bounds in security that have come about in the last 10 - 15 years.
To say that these organisations are a fraud or hacks or whatever you so wish to name them is actually laughing in the face of the internet and in fact, the hacks and frauds are the organisations that took over the job of running the internet with the blessing of the ISP's because it helped them to make money.
Host names were needed because of the way peoples minds work, written language works better than numbers, we remember them easier but the principle is the same. The internet was a very simple principle, packets of data get assigned an IP address to find and basically hop about the internet until it found its target machine and deliver its message.
Hostnames in fact do not need a domain name server to resolve them to an IP address, what they need is an algorithm that would be universal on every machine and every machine would use it so that when a Hostname is given to a machine, its IP address is generated from it. When a Hostname is typed into browser or any other program they used the internet the browser would instantly know the IP address because it would be using that very same algorithm that was initially used.
I know you will say that just anybody can create a Hostname, and so they should be able to. in order to authenticate a machine and its authority as being the true valid Hostname, the algorithm could simply take into account a serial number of the machine and thus eliminate the need for name servers.
The reason for governing bodies came into existence was initially to maintain some order in the Hostname creation and they simply took over the internet from there.
If they must exist to maintain the internet and keep things in order then I believe their only job should be to validate a Hostname, Let them send a key to a machine to create a Hostname, in this way they can still prevent false Hostnames being generated as long as the algorithm included a step that required a call to them.
All browsers would also do this check otherwise they couldn't generate a valid IP address, the one problem is this brings in a single point of failure but that too could be avoided if they had distributed servers for the job.
In essence this is a really simple process and the prevention, creation and verification of a Hostname, we already have a method in place that could be used. SSL certificates already do it and this could be used as a base for ensuring order elsewhere than just a secure connection.
I hope my very long ramble is informative and helpful. Sorry it went on so long but as you can see I am very passionate about this specific topic but in any case, have a nice day and i hope you enjoyed the read :)
