Since the assertions of any given protocol are declarations emanating from some kind of entity, the nature of such entities directly influences the assertions they declare in the protocols they govern. As each protocol is based on a set of assertions, the stack as a whole is thus comprised of a large accumulation of assumptions. Therefore, any trends that exist among the entities that govern the protocols of the stack will be reflected in the stack as a whole. There are more protocols than any one person would ever be able to deeply examine by themselves but there are some general trends that I have observed in my time in the industry.
Most of these governing entities are nonprofits, NGOs, or government agencies which act as either some sort of industry consortium, regulator, or mix of both. In a free market economy, some level of collaboration between otherwise competitive corporations is not only necessary but beneficial to both the industry and the consumer, and these governing agencies are meant to provide that neutral ground where this collaboration can take place. In these spaces are industry-wide protocols designed, approved, and ultimately leveraged by every company in the industry.
And yet, even though the governing entity may itself be a nonprofit or government agency that is supposed to be empowered by the will of the common people, they tend to not assert their own ideology on the corporations that they harbor; rather, they merely provide the neutral ground for these companies to work out their common problems and assert no terms over how they should conduct their business. They do not seek to direct the profit-seeking nature of their corporate members towards any particular objective, they simply enable them to more efficiently seek profit in any way that they see fit. As a result, most of these assertions have been made within constraints imposed by businesses and their need for profit, and as a result these assertions have created a stack which maximizes the ability for corporate entities to extract value from the various layers.
DNS is a striking example of this phenomenon. Though some TLDs are meant to serve a particular purpose and as such have more strict requirements when it comes to getting a subdomain with them, most TLDs are simply incentivized to sell as many subdomains as possible. Practices like domain squatting and mass reselling align with that incentive and as such are not policed by TLDs themselves but rather by the harmed parties through legal and other arbitration channels.
Another, more hidden way that value is extracted from the protocol is through the use of resolvers. When using the Internet, most people do not query the root DNS servers directly but rather an intermediate resolver. These resolvers cache records that they retrieve from the root DNS servers and in turn serve them to the end user making the request. Though anyone in principle could run their own resolver or configure their machine to query a root server directly, in practice the vast majority of people do not and instead just let their machine do what it was configured to do by default, which just so happens to be to query resolvers run by private companies. This provides yet another way for those companies to track personal activity on the web and they can use that data in any way they see fit.
But perhaps the biggest way that profit is extracted from the protocol is through the myriad services offered around it. From registration to email to website hosting to cybersecurity, there is a veritable army of companies built off of enabling users to leverage the protocol for its intended purpose. These services are not necessarily nefarious, in fact many of them will always exist in some form similar to how ICANN occupies a position which will always exist. However, since this army feeds off of the protocol as it currently is, they would not inherently be incentivised to devise new assertions to shape the protocol in a different way. Only an outsider can envision the opportunities which lie in altering these assertions.