Guys - I think to keep ICANN out of hot water completely, and keep registrants happy, it would be a public vote via Poll.  
This way ICANN avoids the “too close in proximity” problem it has in many eyes regarding Verisign.
Similarly  - Karl Auerbach (former ICANN) suggests if there was such a failure:

[if ICANN were to vanish] "...we would notice that the net had not even stuttered; not one packet would fail to reach its intended destination and DNS registration and renewal would continue as if nothing had happened."

"ICANN is the USSR of the internet" - Karl Auerbach speaks out
STORY AT WWW.INTERNETCOMMERCE.ORG

-Jude


On 4/24/07 1:39 AM, "Thomas Roessler" <roessler@does-not-exist.org> wrote:

> On 2007-04-24 12:55:45 +1200, Franck Martin wrote:
>
>> 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). This would ensure continuity of the DNS in case of
>> failures. The business continuity is the responsability of the
>> registry and/or registrar.
>
>> As a side benefit it would allow ICANN to publish stats on the
>> domain names and check that zones are correct (technically that
>> is).
>
> The other critical piece of data are any that let registrants claim
> the domain names they have registered.  (I'm wording things that way
> quite deliberately, since there are a number of ways to implement
> that kind of thing.)
>
> Even more than DNS information, that's the data that are being
> maintained by registrars and that need to survive a failure -- in
> fact, the DNS might very well point to hosted services that have
> just gone down together with the registrar in question; being able
> to write to the DNS is the critical ability that's needed.
>
> Cheers,