No, AlterNIC would have failed regardless of the underlying technology. Its founder became a pariah. It's similar in a lot of ways to Handshake; just imagine that Handshake gets tired of nobody but Opera resolving its names, and then it hacks ICANN, and you've got pretty much a replay of that situation.

It's worth comparing 1997 to 2022 to see why attempts to seize the Internet roots are unlikely to go anywhere. It's similar in a bunch of ways to the WebPKI. For all its faults, AlterNIC had a better case against Network Solutions than anyone has against ICANN: Internet governance at the time prohibited new TLDs, and registrars were rapacious. But over the next 10 years, that mostly changed, just like the WebPKI has been drastically cleaned up after abuses in the 2000s.

People continually propose replacements for the WebPKI today that seem premised on a CA system that works like it did in 2005. But we don't have the 2005 WebPKI; we have 2022's.

(I was doing DNS security work at the time Kashpureff cache poisoned internic.net, and it was a pretty formative experience for me, if people wonder why I'm so shocked that anyone would take Handshake seriously).

Comparing Eugene's exploit to a decentralized root owned by the commons that complements ICANN's system is confusing to me. I can understand how his exploit could be a formative experience for you, what I can't understand is how that experience relates to Handshake.

What you're saying is like, "imagine if a security researcher decided he was tired of getting paid much less than he deserves and decides to hack a bank," and then using this imagined experience as a "logical" reason to hold disdain for something.

You're welcome to your opinion, but please stop trying to paint a false picture about Handshake specifically unless you're using actual facts that are real life and not imagined.