While I agree that our current root DNS system is a legacy artifact of the early days of the Internet, you're totally welcome to build your own ISP and not use the root nameservers. Whether people will want to interconnect with you is another question.
> you’re totally welcome to build your own ISP and not use the root nameservers
That’s a drastic overstatement. I believe what AJ007 is referring to is OpenNIC, which is a DNS service that provides custom and free domain registration using custom TLDs like .geek and .chan. It forwards existing TLDs to the root nameservers so that it’s interoperable with the current DNS system. It has its pros and cons- I used it for a few months without any major issues. It certainly doesn’t require building your own ISP to sidestep the current root nameservers.
Medium sized AS backbone network operations speaking: nobody takes this seriously, and not one of more than a hundred individual ISPs we peer with uses opennic. It's dismissed as a bunch of dilettantes by people I know who run DNS services relied upon by millions of customers.
That’s fine and everyone is entitled to their opinions. But my point is that it’s an alternative root nameserver that anyone can choose to use without the need of starting their own ISP or breaking the current system. The technology exists and it’s been up and running for a while now. The seriousness of it all and whether or not important people dismiss the technology is a moot point.
As I understand it, their issue is that it's not relevant for their customer base (nobody has requested access to the weird non ICANN top level domains), and it risks balkanizing the established single global Internet into things that can't talk to each other.
Essentially the same problem as if people started picking random non-RFC1918 /8 IP space ranges and numbering their networks into them, or choosing their own arbitrary AS numbers.
