It sort if have to be. In the end there has to be one source of truth for each TLD, otherwise who is to say who owns foo.com, and what it resolves to?

And then the same structure for assigning TLD ownership.

But there is nothing stopping you from running another DNS service, call it DNS2 with different root servers, etc. It is just going to be extemely hard to convince people to use it.

I never recline my seat, but if I was sitting infront of that guy I would move it down for a bit. Then up again. Then down again. Etc for however long the flight is