Re: What would happen if
I was musing along similar lines just yesterday - what if everyone took their toys home and left ICANN to play with themselves (make of that last bit what you will ;-) ) ?
The answer of course is that "no-one will" - for the very reasons outlined in another article just last week.
If any small group wanted to break away, then in practical terms they'd be well and truly stuffed as they'd then be in their own little bit of isolated internet - their users would not be able to access the majority of the internet, and whoever stuck their neck out and tried it would find that their users would very quickly cut it off.
Only if you got enough people together - and in particular, all the registries involved - then you could possibly try a break away and "take the internet with you". But again, speaking practically - unless the "new root" and the "ICANN root" are the same, then there would be mass confusion which would be bad for everyone.
A breakaway group could declare it's new root as "THE" root - but until all DNS operators worldwide update their hints files then the "old root" would still be active. Get millions of admins worldwide to agree on changing their root hints ? Good game, good game !
You might possibly get by with just taking "most" of the root servers with you - then you could update the records they publish to exclude the ones still controlled by ICANN. But that's still a bit hit and miss and DNS servers around the world would then suffer "indeterminate" data depending on which root server they happened to query when updating. Registries would need to ensure that they kept the records up to date at both the new and ICANN roots - lest the TLDs they operate should become "flaky" (only resolvable if the DNS server doing the resolution has the "right" root server list).
So while it would seem an attractive thought - just tell ICANN where to stuff it's root - in practical terms it just can't happen.