[CuriousSkeptic]

I want to have a few different line if thoughts to that concern.

a) On black hats, and presumably the risk of being tricked. Perhaps this is an orthogonal problem to who controls the name. Then again it might not.

b) On who the name is valuable for. You hint at there being a public interest in who controls the name. The free market response would be that in theory if the black hats can extract more value its because the invisible hand provides that value to the public in unforeseen ways. Or it may be that we just exchange one rent extractor for another, in which case perhaps the public should be more directly involved in the value assignment. A democratically governed central authority is one approach, another might be a more direct decentralised trust/value assessment towards a particular assignment

c) On bidding. I can see different approaches but to avoid a takeover situation a bid would probably have to binding over some significant time making it implausible for a takeover to be profitable unless the calculated return can be sustained.