I do not believe in the current ideology of the domain system. Suppose a business starts a company (and I am not one who believes business is sinful; on the contrary, I think good business is a great virtue), and the company's business is the business of the Internet. How does this company maintain its business?
With the Internet, the domain is the center of the business. Take it away, and everything collapses. In something as simple as a name, everything rises and falls. Everything depends on it.
So it is the company's best policy to take good care of its property in the domain name. However, under the current system this is impossible. It is not the business who takes care of its most precious possession, but some large, carelessly operated data center.
The way I believe that it should be is a domain is not good for a 10-year or 5-year or 1-year registration, but for the life of the business. Somehow it needs to be the phone companies' business to take care of the phone lines, and the business' responsibility to take care of their domain.
Right now DNS servers provide names they know in answer to requests across the world, and names they do not know are looked up in other DNS servers, and so on. This is fine and good.
The ultimate authority for providing the name, however, should not be a server someplace else, but the company's own, hired or in-house network.
No one should have to continue paying for domain names rented to them from some unknown god of the Internet. Who gave to that god, I wonder? Once a domain name as been legally obtained, it stays for life, for as long as its purpose exists.