They can sprout up all they want. Adoption, however, is another matter, and I'm fairly confident in predicting that they will never be adopted. Alternate roots

They can sprout up all they want. Adoption, however, is another matter, and I'm fairly confident in predicting that they will never be adopted. Alternate roots have been tried multiple times, and they've never gotten any traction beyond nerds like you and me. The seizures you speak of weren't a failure of the DNS, either. They were the failure of registrars caving to pressure. The delegation of the domains did not change, GoDaddy (one instance I can think of) simply took control of the zone. Amusingly, everybody turned around and blamed ICANN as if they have anything to do with it, further proving that there are scant few people who understand how critical systems of the Internet work.