So it's better to entrust your domain rental to some possibly-sketchy corporation registered who-knows-where, rather than a registry run by a government, in the hopes that ICANN will play nice if there's a dispute?

The article does make the point that this is merely lower risk, and not zero risk, and raises quite nicely the point that all we're doing is renting a name->IP-address mapping. IMHO this is the core problem.

We ought to be able to buy (i.e. a one-time, non-recurring payment for an irrevokable mapping) domain names, but I'll confess that I can't come up with a reasonable technical scheme for making that work.