I think ICANN (and any escrow organisation named by ICANN) should have a zone copy of the 2nd level TLDs (root being the first level).
The 2LD zone files are all available for download to anyone who asks,* so I presume there are thousands of copies all over the world. Lots of us collect statistics on them. For example, see my blog posting a year ago when .MUSEUM and .AERO and .COOP renewals were under discussion. As someone else noted, the critical data that escrow needs to preserve is the ownership of each domain. So it's just wrong that the current proposal doesn't escrow the actual owner behind names that use domain privacy proxies. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly. * - except for .TRAVEL, which has consistently refused to provide it