Alas, users delegate this authority. They do not change defaults and let network admins decide where computers should point and what software will be used. The admins all point their computers to ICANN roots and ICANN roots are sometimes hardcoded into DNS software that admins insist on using.

Yet it is absoutely true, all it takes is changing some settings so that computers point elsewhere. ICANN derives its "authority" from voluntary behaviour of network admins.

And then what? You want to put up a website that only resolves from said alternative DNS server, so you… tell everyone who may want to visit your site that they have to first setup a different DNS server?

Yes. For few purposes, this is a feature, not a bug.

Examples:

• if a site is banned from ICANN DNS, then there is no other choice,

• if I want to keep bots, spammers, search systems, providers, and government out of the door,

• if I want to welcome technical elite but hide from everybody else, like it was in old Internet.

• if I don't want to pay X$ every year for every domain.

• if I want to have a cool name for my site.

• if I want to create overlays for popular sites, to fight ads, spam, promotions, PR, and unwanted content.

The crypto and Gemini communities are fine doing it (for better or worse)

Doesn't Gemini still use the normal DNS servers?

I don’t know. My point was that some groups have no issues forcing their users to install a separate system to access their “internet”

It's just another protocol.

It does.

Most people don’t know how to do that, so they are stuck with whatever Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, etc. offer despite there being better solutions from Cloudflare, Google, and OpenDNS.

It would be more interesting if a federation of non-profit ISPs were to do that! :)

People won't do that.

My understanding is that anyone running Firefox already has, unless they went out of their way not to. Is that no longer the case?

If you mean DoH it's still pointing to the DNS administered by ICANN/IANA just a different entry point.

"People" means common folk, with their Edge, Chrome, Android Chrome and iOS Safari. There is the web that 'just works' and the web where you need to open up the back of the unit and start swapping wires.

Common folk delegate via their network administrator, often an ISP.

Yes exactly.