Comment by teddyh

The “rent-seeking certificate infrastructure” could be solved if web browsers used the DNS (and DNSSEC) to validate certificates. The DNS, on the other hand, is more tricky. If you want human-readable and globally distinct (and stable) names, you have to have a centralized structure to keep track of who has what name. The best we could come up with was the DNS, which is at least hierarchical instead of completely monolithic. And then it becomes a question of: do you want name holders to continually pay for names in some way, or do you want a land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30 years ago now owns it forever for free? With DNS, that question is decided by each node in the tree of the hierarchy.