[tannhaeuser]

Well to buy a domain you need to go to an accredited registrar for the respective TLD. And DNS registrations, renewals, etc. are standardized (and have TLD-specific policies). Also, you're entitled to transfer your domain name to another registratr, etc., also with a public and transparent protocol. The registrar will then arrange for their nameserver being registered as authoritative for your domain on the TLD's root domain server, etc. What's the problem with US ISPs here? That they're selling DNS query records (with your IP) against their nameservers? That's in the same territory as Cloudflare and Google, and will only stop with proper privacy laws; certainly not by giving up on the decentralized nature of DNS and giving all traffic/signals to Cloudflare/Google.