We are approaching a model akin to AOL keywords. Instead of a business directly controlling the namespace, we have a quasi-public institution that likely will continue to act at the behest of corporate interests.
For those who say the ship has sailed: I say this is only another chipping away at the democratic nature of the net. We must push back, or the beatings will continue.
There's surely a lot of sucky things about the new arrangement where big companies can buy TLDs, but it's much more democratic for the rest of the 95% of humanity than when the US had de-facto control of the system. Just look at how many new TLDs are e.g. owned by Chinese companies.
It's a quirk of a home grown system having outgrown its original purpose.
Fully democratized decentralized naming simply lets the powerful squat on all the good names.
It's the tyranny of structurelessness.
That is a thing that happens, and it has a real effect. Those organisational charters inevitably reflect some underlying ethical system, and I think the role of those ethics in influencing organisations and their members is still under-appreciated in some contexts (I'm certainly not saying that free market economics or libertarianism - for example - don't have any ethical system, by the way - more the contrary). For example, over here, picking maybe the most visible examples, the NHS, Channel 4, and the BBC - and many of the people who work for them are heavily influenced by the ethical ideas behind them.
The current hierarchy is pretty weird. US GOVernment gets one, and US MILitary gets a separate one, and all US COMmercial entities get one, and most of the rest are non-specified ORGanizations, and the rest of the world gets to build under their 2-letter country codes. Except when company in San Francisco thinks it's cool to use one of those country codes to spell the end of a word, of course.
Ask any person to draw a diagram which includes all groups (and potential groups) in the world, and nobody will ever come up with what we've got now.
I don't see an obvious solution. It's a bad idea to let companies create their own top level domains (especially when it's taken from a region of indigenous peoples whose land is threatened!), but maintaining the old status quo doesn't seem like such a great idea, either.
Have there been any serious proposals to overhaul the structure of DNS names?
.com isn't US-specific.
Why? I would love to have an open DNS system not controlled by some registrars, and by a body which dictates that .paris is fine, but .hdjdhduh is not (except for a huge cost)