I know there were places like tk but they were less an organization managing the TLD and more a phishing and SPAM pit which still had a paid side of the business anyways. Other places offer varying things on this spectrum for subdomains but it's not a TLD and they often don't attempt to solve any of the actual problems offering domains does.
An alternative root just feels excessive given we only need 1 "good natured" TLD for the way we use the web to remain unchanged while preventing price gouging to host on it.
Let's never forget our homies and bredrin over at https://freedns.afraid.org/
Absolutely abysmal of verisign. I still remember back when they made every NXDOMAIN resolve to their shitty web-search breaking the internet. Lasted about a week.
There's absolutely no reason to raise the prices.
Not sure I'd want a free tld, but would definitely like one that doesn't allow some of the seo gaming allowed on the other tlds and had something closer to a fixed price that allowed the registrar to operate as well as other reg's to make say $2/yr on... maybe $5/yr or something.
Now, the price for owning such a basic domain name is insanely high compared to what it is. By now, in a free market, price should be close to zero and not the opposite.
These ass are abusing of their monopoly position to racket us all, I would like so much that something could be done by someone.
For custom root domains like CEO, I don't care that much, but .com, .net, should be kind of a common good.
Otherwise, maybe we should push for an alternative global domain name system.