Most of the people involved with this circus seem to think that they can maintain an artificial scarcity of names, that they can be manipulated like a real reso

Most of the people involved with this circus seem to think that they can maintain an artificial scarcity of names, that they can be manipulated like a real resource to gain financial advantage. However, all that's needed to completely obsolete the existing domain name system is for any significant part of the total population of Internet users to agree to use a new one. It's not even necessary to change the software used for DNS or change how the system works. Just agree to change, select new master servers, configure the software and start resolving. Because of the way the system works, the old and new DNS trees can even coexist, all that's needed is to list members of the new system as servers for resolution, to be checked in addition to the ones for the old system. Thinking about it, it's quite likely that this has already been done, and that independent DNS systems are already in use for things like the "Dark Web". The major purpose of having an organization manage the name and number spaces is to organize them and avoid collisions... I don't think the people at ICANN really understand how replaceable their function is.