What ISP's can do is stop registering trash domains. Tell your users to put their WWW pages in a domain park of some kind, rather than allocating a TLD for every one-person "company" whose scope of operations is a local city or neighborhood.
How do you educate the mom-and-pop ISPs and businesses? If I do this now, they just walk two blocks away to the other guys, who will register them. Changing the paradigm probably won't be possible until either a technical issue of the impact of prefix-filtering and address allocation restrictions forces the issue, or the namespace looks like alphabet soup like you mention, and becomes almost a non-differentiated mass.
The Madison Avenue gang won't like a heirarchical product branding scheme, which is probably how they look at domain names now.
Domain name charges are currently based on cost recovery; i.e., at $50/year it pays for the cost of collection and the cost of talking to "customers" and the cost of buying and running whois and dns servers, with some money left over for "public domain software for internet infrastructure" (which I'm hoping means ISC since we'll be out of money for BIND,INN,DHCP,K5 at the end of 1996). [Sorry, into every message must come a shameless plug.] In an actual free market, the consume price floats between the value received and the competitive minimum profit margin. If domain name charges were based on how much folks were willing to pay, which in turn means how much the domain is worth to them, I suspect they would be much much higher than $50/year. IBM or HP or DEC or Apple would cheerfully pay $10K/year for their second level domain, and speaking briefly as a capitalist I think that's what it ought to cost. Anyone who can't pay probably doesn't need a second level domain and they ought to band together with their buddies to form a domain park and share the second level charges. The reason we're having this problem is partly due to US-GOV subsidies, partly due to the "it's always been free" culture, and partly due to the differential between the apparent costs (servers, linkes, people to answer phones, etc) and the transparent costs (every new domain pollutes the pool, thus dragging down the actual value of all other domains). I'm more or less blathering here. There's no way IANA would try to move to a value-based pricing scheme and once YMBK's proposal becomes pseudolaw, there will be enough TLD registries that the price will hover just above cost recovery _anyway_, due to competitive pressures from other registries. What I am personally hoping is that the various new TLD's will try different subdomain schemas and that the ones who are most successful financially will be the ones whose end-user domain names are "prettiest" and that we will therefore never see another flat namespace like *.COM. In fact I hope to see people leaving *.COM in droves once prettier/deeper TLD's are available from multiple competing name providers.
<URL:ftp://ftp.vix.com/pri/vixie/dns-badnames.psf.gz> is my position in full
I'd like to, but you've disappeared from all the NAPs! [...]
Never send a host to do a router's job. (All better now.)