The financial backing is non-trivial. You're going to need some pretty serious big iron, and some pretty bad-ass bandwidth.
Non-profit doesn't necessarily mean doesn't make any money. The registries are already paying to register domains in the first place. I'm not opposed to some trivial per-domain fee to pay for the whole project. Aside from self-funding though, think of how many registries are willing to kick serious money into a project that would remove Verisign as a monopoly over the space. You can bet on BuyDomains.com and BulkRegister.com would get materially involved.
Oh.. and you'll need trusted and experienced people, and be willing to pay them.
I didn't say it was something that could be done overnight =) If the community wanted to do this, you'd need to get people together and put together a business plan just like you would if you were starting a business - it's not just a big project, it's a HUGE project, and one that requires the utmost critical planning. I don't think there'll be any shortage of trusted and experienced people though =).
Don't like how a TLD is run? Talk to ICANN and the administrator of that TLD.
If it's as simple as establishing a set of rules to govern all of the registries (or risk getting your TLD dropped - obviously an extremely serious consequence) I'm all for it as opposed to reorganizing. Remember though, ICANN are the ones who approved a Waiting List service for Verisign. It seems to me that they wouldn't be interested in enforcing some of these more serious issues.
