And I have too many bad memories of Alternic to feel comfortable about Peter Sunde's P2P ideas.
IMHO, there is a basic and fundamental flaw on many of the "alternate" schemes. The current "DNS ecosystem" has been feeding the pockets of many for many years and became what a ~$7B? industry ? many folks are making a living out of it, so any alternate solution that doesn't take seriously in account the economic side will encounter high resistance to change. Also, who you will really trust to run it ?
Balancing all of that, internationalizing ICANN may be the best solution.
ICANN is not the problem. It is itself a problem because over the years instead of being a technical coordinator for names and numbers became the playground and clearinghouse for IP (Intellectual Property) groups, all sorts of color, sizes and shapes of attorneys milking from the "DNS ecosystem" and Internet Governance wanna be politiks. Also while different segments may have some level of participation (including folks that claim they represent the users which they do not) by design ICANN is a membership less organization so the multi stake holder model is a lie and the bottom up process when the bottom does not have the same level of resources to participate as some of the big corp/lobby groups, ends being a fiasco. With the current architecture what you need to internationalize is IANA, but who you will trust with that ? ITU ? As I commented in other forums, I believe that what we need is a novel and well thought resource directory and location service/protocol where central authority and uniqueness are not fundamental requirements, and as said before something that on the long run can be monetized in a way that creates an economic incentive for people to use it. Meanwhile, as Randy said, our only option is to keep dealing with the current system. Regards Jorge