How about getting the browser and OS makers together to use an alternate DNS system? It only needs Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft to agree and ICANN can be made irrelevant overnight.
> It only needs Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft to agree and ICANN can be made irrelevant overnight. Of course not. The Web is only a small part of the Internet. DNS is used by way more services than Web browsers.
Actually, I bet by now it doesn't even matter that much even there any more. Consider how the search in google already forms an effective alternative dns for many actual humans attempting to manually go somewhere.
If you have a .org domain, you can change all the non-browser uses of the domain pretty easily. The tools in the background of things don't care what the names are. You can change them and it's really not that much of a disruption.
Once someone finds your site, via their browser, you can populate that site with whatever kinds of urls and directions and references you want. Just like no one really cares how ugly and long all the urls to actual things other than the front page are. Your site can include say, the directions to access your API, and those directions don't have to say foo.org in them. Even existing api users that break if you have to change your name, can react to that change easily enough.
Email is probably the biggest problem. We will all simply have to never pin too much dependency on any single email address. But we already have to do that, so no loss.
If you had set up your own domain so you weren't at the mercy of google killing your gmail account and killing your ability to prove ownership of everything else in your life, well you would just need to have more than one email registered with everything like paypal etc. So me@mydomain.org can break and you don't die from it.
You just better realize your domain is going to break and unregister those emails everywhere before it goes into someone else's hands. Because when someone else owns a domain, then they can receive all emails sent to any name at that domain, including "reset password" mails.
It's not the most fun passtime, but it's not necessarily the end of the world either.
It really is human interactive web browser usage where the exact name matters most. So if cloudflare and google simply sent browsers to the right place and ignored the traditional root authority for .org, or any other name lookup, that would pretty much be good enough.
Google could do it already without even violating dns just through search results.