Reviewing what I can find about the A/I case I highly doubt ICANN or the .org registry (PIR) were involved, and calls to find "ICANN-independent" registries¹ are not addressing the cause here. And while I also dream of a fully decentralized Internet, we won't dismantle the current structures today and build a good replacement in its stead tomorrow.
But again, I suspect what happened to A/I was not due to the centralized nature of DNS, nor that ICANN or PIR played a role. This is since:
- ICANN is governed by intl. law, not US law.
- PIR is subject to similar rules due to it's intricate nature and contracts with ICANN.
- Neither has/had business relations with A/I (!)
This makes for a tricky legal case, even after putting them on the OFAC list. Not an impossible one, but a tricky one. It's much easier to bully the registrar into submission, i.e., the entity
- That has direct business dealings with A/I
- Has likely enough of a presence in the US to fear sanctions
- Is a private company that intl. govts. wouldn't care too much about
- And even if they didn't get a court order... they may just buckle in advance.
It's much simpler and quicker to just ring the registrar. Maybe they didn't even need that and they just did just like Cisco put them on their Cisco Web Filter list.
So yes, we need to decentralize, but this will take a looong time. And the resilient infra we need in the mean time may still include ICANN where we can't help it. Because it's unlikely that ICANN was behind what just happened.
EDIT: Disclosure: I am part of @dotmeow, we will have a contract with ICANN due to being a regular gTLD and no ccTLD (founding a country for cat girls just to get a ccTLD sounded a bit too much, even for us) but are based in Belgium as a non-profit. When it comes to deplatforming .meow domains, however, it's not us who receive the first call but your registrar. Choose wisely.
¹ no such thing really, but yes, some ccTLDs have a tiny bit more sovereignty but possibly other problems, see the .af-incident and may also be prone to US bullying
