this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but this was the inevitable result of changing a function with trivial cost and broad social utility (name registration) from a public service to a commercial one. at the time we heard a lot of standard arguments about the innovation and competition that only a market based solution could bring. its really not a surprise that this is the kind of innovation that resulted.
Yes - domain registries should be run by the government.
DNS etc can be run by third parties
Nominet does yet they outsource.
Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains
UN of course
this is not even funny.
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How would that help? The government could still block domains registered by people in adversarial countries.
Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.
I certainly wasn't nominating the US government. something more like international NGO. the us can do whatever it wants with the .us root, just like all the other ISO country code roots.
So, ICANN?
the internet corporations for names and numbers was established specifically to coordinate the for profit registrar model. but sure, an organization like that with a charter to simply manage the namespace directly.