I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last twenty years. At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those interests in the way the…
I've always wondered if they could somehow price domains logorithmically. First domain is cheap and then cost goes up x% per additional domain. Stop people holding swaths of domains at each gTLD level. Would people end up just having a bunch of shelf corps...
The CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) at least, probably others, used to give away domains for free but stopped the practise due to squatting.