It seems to me that America is making a rod for it's own back here, and taking the rest of the world along for the beating with it.

There should be no TLDs other than countries, and it's only America's refusal to use its .us suffix for its domestic sites that prevents this.

Working with country TLDs would then automatically put the censorship (and similar) issues with governments, at the expense of inconveniencing truly global companies who can actually justify being in a TLD. The legality issue is also addressed as domains would (have to) be set up in jurisdictions where they are legal.

ICANN is controlled (directly or indirectly) by the US Government. The thing that needs to happen first, is for ICANNs work to done by a global, non-governmental organisation. (e.g. ITU)

Once ICANN is not subject to the whim of a US President (or US Corporations), then things might move forward is a more rational manner.

although no one likes to hear it. People get excited when you tell them the truth but the WWW is a US property that they allow other people to use (just like GPS). The US is going to control and f*ck up the Internet for everyone forever. Nothing to be done for it so just smile, have a cookie, and watch some free porn. (which is the only truly useful thing to come from the Internet anyway)

...will likely continue as a very useful point of leverage, until this country goes broke (which, at the current level of borrowing, shouldn't take more than another 5 to 7 years at most).

please note that there is nothing (except maybe technical competence) stopping other countries from getting together and redirecting all DNS queries to their own servers that spoof like TLD roots. it would take some hacking to change all their core routers at approximately the same time, but if managed properly, there is no technical reason why it can't be done.

careful coordination and timely action will be required, along with meticulous preparation (zone transfers, registry spoofing, etc.), several trial runs on isolated networks, and then a near-global cutover.

properly executed, this would bypass the current root servers completely, while duplicating the functionality in a parallel spoofed structure.

this would be somewhat more difficult after secure DNS is implemented, but it would still be possible.

fortunately for the US, the rest of humanity doesn't cooperate worth a damn. unfortunately for the US, "things that can't go on forever, don't" (a statement made famous by Herb Stein, an economic adviser to the Reagan administration). at some point, this structure will have to diversify; let's hope it's not at the point of catastrophic failure.