The hope is to get a non-corrupt TLD in place that won't raise prices on you with no caps (and if possible while we're at it, won't charge you for certificate signing.) Ideally, a real winner would be a pay-once, own-for-life (say 100 years) TLD. I might be willing to drop $500 on a domain I know I'll never have to remember to renew.
Anything that doesn't work out-of-the-box is dead on arrival, though. I would never be willing to move my domain from .org to a system that people couldn't get to without installing additional software (eg OpenNIC.) But if every OS and/or every major browser supported OpenNIC, then I'd be willing to make the switch.
As stated by another person, yeah I'd want it to not overlap with the existing ICANN TLDs. Not too hard to do, and we could fix one of the bigger annoyances of DNS and correct the ordering: bsnes.byuu.org -> #newtld.byuu.bsnes, for example could work, or even just #byuu -> #byuu.bsnes and only have a sole TLD for it.
I don't know how we stop squatters, maybe a one-time registration fee would be reasonable, but that would be discriminatory as $100 would be trivial for developers in the US, and impossible for service workers in Mozambique that just want a personal website.
It's not as though .com/.net/.org (and heck, even a lot of the new gTLDs) aren't absolutely filled to the brim with squatters already.
Unfortunately, with at least Chrome and Firefox moving to DNS-over-HTTPS, they are the entities deciding on address resolution for 99% of average-user requests.
I would agree with you in principle however, in which case there's an even more impossible goal: get Microsoft, Apple, Google, and every Linux/BSD distro to agree to a new OS-level alternate domain name resolver that functions out of the box. And also stop Google and Mozilla from rolling out browser-level DoH.
The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days.
Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle that easily.
Dealing with all the companies trying to sue you over others squatting their domains and having to decide who has the better claim would be the most expensive part.
I really hate to say it because it's so cliche and overused, but a blockchain-like system could remove the central authority, the server costs, and the lawsuit risks. But it would introduce concerns over trust, most likely.
The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. If even one of them didn't support it, nobody would ever consider using it for their websites. Browser extensions, even if they allowed access to intercept domain name lookups, would not work. It would have to be supported out of the box in every major browser, and well, good luck with that. Anything failing to herd those three cats right out of the starting gate is absolutely dead on arrival.
Who knows though, maybe they'll raise .org prices just a bit too much, and piss off an established non-profit enough to start a huge campaign to create an alternative. But probably not.
It always astounded me that for the longest time until only recently, you were expected to pay additional money, more than the domain cost itself, for HTTPS security (and if you wanted a wildcard certificate, substantially more money.)
I guess when the gTLD explosion didn't result in massive new profits for the new TLDs (some are $100+/year!), the powers that be decided to focus on existing TLDs instead where there's extensive decades-long lock-in effects at play. No one needed company-name.ninja, but good luck giving up your company-name.org to a squatter or worse, your competition.
Several of these extremist sites even forbid and censor attempts at calm, level-headed rebuttals to such hatred. They exist solely to propagate bigotry.
The dog and pony show from Google and Cloudflare of only stepping in after multiple mass shootings and tons of press coverage tells you all you really need to know about these companies' ethics. They react to sufficiently bad PR, not out of any set of principles, be they either freedom of speech (keeping these sites online) or reducing harm (deplatforming.)