Ask HN: What changes to net infrastructure are needed so no gov can control it?

This question relates to SOPA, both in terms of enforcing it through DNS filtering, but also any other way they might choose to try to enforce it. But it's intent is towards political-neutrality of the internet.

I heard from a Herman Chinery-Hesse talk, that African payment transaction systems (used by services like M-Pesa) have redundancy in various countries, so political forces in specific governments can't shut them down completely. It seems that SOPA exploits a weakness of the internet, that ICANN is US-based. How could the pan-African approach be applied into the current DNS system and other systems that SOPA might exploit?

For example, to counteract SOPAs potential attempt to control DNS, what would be needed in addition to a hot backup of ICANN's database in Sweden and maybe a few other countries? The OSI-model-friendly way would be to get support of international ISPS to configure different upstream DNS servers, in those downstream from ICANN "fail" to provide the requested record. But could breaking the OSI help? In-build browser support for "backup" DNS servers? Opt-in by installing an anti-SOPA DNS browser plugins?

I'm hoping the question is read as broader than just this example though. What are the weaknesses in general that should be addressed?