I here what you are saying. My point is that the other infrastructure pieces create a check and a balance to the entire system. It is an internet cold war if you will. If Country XYZ forces the UN to require a member of ICANN to shut down access to a TLD in the US, Country XYZ and even the UN has no authority to stop a large cloud service provider from shutting down access to cloud infrastructure that physically sits in Country XYZ being used by citizens and corporations of County ZYX as a response. They have no way to stop hosting companies from dropping TLD requests coming from certain root servers to their own nameservers or companies simply blacklisting sites and IP ranges thereby blocking access to millions of their own citizenry's websites and services.
Worst case if Country XYZ seizes resources of say a hosting provider from datacenters located in Country XYZ that belong to a US corporation, everything is encrypted, good luck getting access to it and all they have done is removed access by there citizenry to their own stuff. There are many many more possible examples of no-win scenarios that should give pause to any group assuming they have a real monopoly on the system.
To be sure no one wants to live in that internet world of "mutually assure 404 responses and packet losses" And that's kind of my point. The cost is too high for everyone.
Besides the dark web already exists it would just get bigger and go more mainstream.
Having said all of that I believe that the biggest danger for the web is from regulation and control from within the US. To make the system really free would require 3 major changes:
1. Pattern the DNS system after the bitcoin model and let anyone be a root server if they want to. The beauty of this model is that it is not controlled by any one source government, agency, county, or company. First one to resolve the address request gets a cut of advertising dollars.
2. DNS would need to change from a simple key:value (domain:IP Address) to a 3 item tuple such as (domain, UUID, IP Address), now you could have unlimited versions of the same name domain name deflating the cost of any domain name. There are a lot of challenges to over come like getting the correct ip address for the correct
example.com but if fixed would really be cost effective.
3. On the network side you create/sell open routers that not only allow wifi access for you devices at home but connect to your neighbors open router and create a public mesh propagating the net through out the community. Again a lot of issues to resolve but potentially disruptive to the current system and any monopolies that are taking advantage of being the gatekeeper.
Solve these three issues and you could clone/extend and an internet network anywhere at any time.