while the Internet has been used for innovative purposes over the last decade, the core infrastructure has suffered from a lack of innovation

On the contrary, the core infrastructure has prospered from the lack of innovation---at least the lack of semantic/commercial/political innovation in the infrastructure. The basic Internet infrastructure has remained mostly neutral by being primitive, and indifferent to the meanings of the messages. Verisign's introduction of real-world semantics at the infrastructural level of DNS degrades the value of the semantically neutral infrastructure, whether their semantic ideas are good or not. Real world semantics simply doesn't belong at the DNS level.

So, we need to take a step backwards with DNS infrastructure, and provide a system of meaningless handles that are entirely free of meaning. DNS is a portable address service, not a semantically driven "navigation tool." A semantics-free DNS using meaningless handles would provide a neutral infrastructure on top of which Verisign and others could compete to provide meaningful navigational tools and other services.

Bob Frankston has already explained [circleid.com] how an institution running a large name server could put a neutral DNS could online tomorrow, within a 3d-level domain of the current DNS. It's time to just do it.

Verisign likes to intentionally confuse issues, by using the language of free enterprise and "innovation", when they're simply an abusive monopolist. George Orwell would be proud of their mastery over "double-speak", although it doesn't fool most people (just a few politicians, once in a while). If they want to truly "innovate", they can do so like everyone else, by not leveraging their existing monopoly.

Introduce better SSL certs or something...oops, Geotrust is taking share.

Introduce better domain registration services....oops, every registrar is kicking their butt in that space too.