From the beginning, people have talked about building an Internet that wouldn’t depend upon the TLD hierarchy. It doesn’t mean there would be two or three Internets, but that you would have a domain name system that wouldn’t depend upon hierarchical naming. As long as there’s coordination across hierarchies about ownership of domain names, you wouldn’t necessarily produce any destructive results.

Lessig on UN on ICANN: Fragment it!

I actually don't think this sort of technical design is as simple as Lessig thinks. This would involve rewriting DNS and it would result in far slower queries. Furthermore, it wouldn't really eliminate the need for central authorities, as there would need to be some system that determines who gets to be a root and what rules they need to follow in order to claim domains. They aren't going to let just anyone do that. So we're back to where we started, with a bunch of technical bloat to add to our policy bloat.

However, much of what Lessig says about ICANN is down to earth.

Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Battling for Control of the Internet