Godaddy has a special reputation on HN and among the tech community in general. I can narrate a few examples that I'm personally aware of, but that's besides the point. But to say that there are not many scams in the DNS business is a bit of stretch. There have been allegations of conflict of interests even in case of ICANN.

The core issue is that DNS is a money factory that exists because of their first mover advantage and incumbency factor. There is no other reason why someone else couldn't have been in charge. It's like those academic publishers in the age of the internet (though they had legitimate reasons to exist before the internet). Their justification for existence is that they already exist. Such systems are ripe for exploitation and corruption. And there is no reason someone won't do it when they get a chance.

A naming system is necessary and a centralized naming system is certainly costly to maintain. But, we could have sacrificed the centralized control in favor of low cost of operation and virtually free identities. (The sacrifice is due to Zooko's triangle). The identities won't be that easy to remember - but we already have a similar system where that issue is solved. We have nearly random phone numbers that we map to pet names in our contacts list. It would have avoided another avenue of unnecessary economic exploitation on the internet.