Belatedly... this article about ICANN & dot-com price increases (which does look rather like ICANN corruption, in my opinion), annoyed me more than I can properly express, despite the fact that initially (first few years) the 7% increase will still be less than I'm paying for dot-nz domain names. This is pretty obvious profiteering by Verisign, and I worry that this will trickle out from the US to domain names for other countries, inevitably turning the ownership of a domain name from something that's a petty cash expense into a real, and significant, cost. It's particularly concerning if you take into consideration similar news in the dot-org space.
It irritated enough that I started looking at alternatives. However, none of the blockchain domain name options look like a particular economic, straightforward, sure-fire win (paticularly not for a non-technical audience) - even OpenNIC, which is the closest tech to the incumbent, would require jumping through additional hoops because I don't believe my current hosting provider supports DNS alternatives - on their forums, I can't find any mention of OpenNIC apart from a note on a "Rejected Feature Proposals" forum, back in 2007, about it being a stale project.
Maybe the global Internet community will eventually route its way around the "damage" by selecting a generally acceptable alternative. Or a privacy-focused browser maker like Mozilla will come up with (and promote) a viable domain name system that the other browser makers will have to implement or be left behind.
In the meantime, perhaps I'll look at redirecting my primary domain elsewhere and route around the problem myself, before the name comes up for renewal in a few years time...