Ah but now you're bringing up so many more profound issues, such as centralized versus decentralized DNS, what a decentralized DNS even means, whether there sho

Ah but now you're bringing up so many more profound issues, such as centralized versus decentralized DNS, what a decentralized DNS even means, whether there should be a DNS, the SSL certificate authority man-in-the-middle fiasco, etc. In the current situation, a domain name is property, which means it can only have one owner, which means that someone must maintain a title registry, somewhere. Given the current situation, it's hard to think outside that box. But the newer ideas I've heard, such as including a hash digest of a public key inside the URL itself, and even the methods employed by TOR with no central registries, are promising. With those methods, I don't think you'll end up with domain names that are universally unique and universally recognized and easily typed (see Zooko's Triangle), but maybe that's not such a bad thing, given the use of search engines and bookmarks. To answer your question directly, there are alternative top-level domain registries. But most computers and browsers are not configured to query them.