Oh, you're talking about decentralization to mean remove any authoritative control over a zone (rather than ability to choose the delegation system), which also

Oh, you're talking about decentralization to mean remove any authoritative control over a zone (rather than ability to choose the delegation system), which also requires upending the resolution design. I'm largely just referring to the namespace management and rules attached. In that respect namecoin isn't a particularly interesting entrant. It doesn't really fix problems with namespace coordination unless you decide they're irrelevant next to maintaining namecoin's ideologically purity. If namecoin were to take off it would just collapse under it's own weight once squatters move in. So, outside of ICANN pushing huge and onerous changes down to their TLDs, I don't really see the utility for namecoin beyond providing resolution for services that would get their domains revoked by a registry for policy reasons or following legal orders.