I am sheepishly conflicted. On the one hand, I get that domains and TLDs are important aspects of branding, people care about making sure terms are tied to the

I am sheepishly conflicted. On the one hand, I get that domains and TLDs are important aspects of branding, people care about making sure terms are tied to the most salient endpoints. On the other hand... isn't this whole system a bit like some guy in a basement writing a list of words next to various numbers? Then we all just decided to tell our machines to listen to that guy? It feels weird to me to be angry at the phone book I chose to use. And if all popular indexing methods are subject to public debate, we end up in strange places. We might single out ICANN as special, more important, but given how many people go through search to land on websites, rather than typing domains directly, in some ways ICANN is just pushing one index in a crowded field. In some ways Google is more ICANN than ICANN. Google's top level results for amazon (and java and cheddar etc.) aren't places. If we don't really like how some guy maps symbols to symbols, maybe we should just make your own map that we do like better? If it is better, promote it, maybe it catches on. Namecoin and Tor basically do this, though they're limited to certain use cases. Some alternate DNS resolvers block/re-map known malicious sites. ICANN isn't forcing us to care about any of its decisions. I don't know, I have enormous uncertainty here, and "hey just abandon a core feature of the internet" is definitely too glib given how unsure I am about all this. But still, it's just an arbitrarily filled map. It feels really weird to me to be angry at a random lookup table. Maybe just walk away from it instead. EDIT: larkeith's top level comment also ends up at ICANN replacement, with far more sympathy and less bewilderment along the way, I respect that a lot. EDIT 2: Brevity. Still failed but trying.