> Has ICANN (or registry) ever been bribed or coerced?

Not that I know of. But it would be quite remarkable for an organization with a global choke point to resist attempts at influence indefinitely.

The upstream comment correctly mentioned owning a domain name being insufficient to be unbannable. There’s no mechanism with owning a domain, or DNS, that’s able to be defended by an individual (nothing like encryption, for example). It’s just someone with more power that allows it, until they don’t.