I'm curious what part of ICANN's mandate is a failure. My understanding is that introducing new TLDs was part of it.

> 7. The Creation of New gTLDs. The Green Paper suggested that during the period of transition to the new corporation, the U.S. Government, in cooperation with IANA, would undertake a process to add up to five new gTLDs to the authoritative root.

https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/statement-polic...

Maybe there are too many new TLDs?

Domain names in general are a flawed idea.

Had public/private key pair cryptography been further along at the beginning of the web, I think we would have wound up with something like public keys that users add a nickname to. Similar to what we already do with phone numbers, but "ownership" locked to a private key.

What happens when you lose your private key? I don't love it, but I'm glad that my domain names are just an entry in a database somewhere that a human can change if necessary. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

There are ways to securely backup private keys.

Loosing your domain name is a far worse. Not only will you not get it back, but whoever owns it now will get all your web traffic. In contrast even if you loose the private key, you could continue to serve any static assets signed by that key, and create a new private key for future assets.

There would also likely end up being plenty of "phone-book" services where you could go and provide a new private key for your company. We already have some of these: Google (Maps), Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc.

Your keys could still be stored in a third party vault.

If your vault goes under, you get a new address and tell people to update their links, just like if you lose a domain.

The key difference being that domains don't get lost, especially if you avoid country TLDs.

Domain names do get lost if you forget to renew or your payment info isn't up to date.

You could argue that's caused by carelessness, but so is losing a private key.

Actually, good point. But that is solvable with better registrar UX. For example, I run a registrar that offers free subdomains, and I'm planning to add support for a long term guarantee, by registering the apex domains for the max time (10 years) and renewing every year.