Not only can I _not_ think of a solution that is better than ICANN in any meaningful way, I would go all the way to claiming that it is absolutely impossible to make anything better than ICANN.

The only exception is a Web of Trust thing / petname system. But that is not comparable to ICANN since it is subjective, not globally unique names.

And I agree with Fiatjaf, human memorable names have inflated value. Watch how often do you write addresses or twitter handles from memory, vs. writing few letters and waiting for autocomplete from your bookmarks or browsing history or social graph etc.