It’s not a USG power play. It just so happens that a large portion of internet engineers and architects live in the United States.
"Ceremony" is the right word for IANA's handling of the root zone, which is a McGuffin in the Internet security model; the DNS roots won't be what the IC targets.
You're off base.
DNSSEC is not any more nebulous than the existing structure and control mechanism with regards to domain names. It (mostly) is adding cryptographic under-pinnings to the responses. The control remains the same (registrar level).