The ICANN board is unelected and always has been, and has been seen as puppets of the tradmark lobby. Brian Reid reported that IBM bragged in a secret meeting with NSI that they has spent "two years of their $30M/yr IP lobbying budget in DC to prevent new TLDs" (Pers. Comms.). Dave Holztmen, then CTO of Network Solution issued the warning "you have no idea how powerful the trademark guys are" (Pers. Comms.).

Now, when ICANN was born, there were roughly 80 cctlds. Today there are 250. Each one was created completely independantly of ICANN polidy and it's talk of "controlled, slow, stable rollout". ICANNhas been "studying" the rollout of new tlds for a decade now, and modulo some of the lamest tlds ever (.museum, .coop, .mobi) in 2000, ICANN has not seen fit to "authorize" adding any of the hundreds of pre-existing new tlds to the legacy root zone. They had no control over the cctlds as those delegations had been made by Jon Postel all before 1997. Keep in mind Postel ran IANA - names and numbers as a "part time task" for $15K/yr. and under him new tlds were created. ICANN CEO Twomey gets nearly a million a year and has for 8 year to *prevent* the creation of new top level domains.

For the trademark guys to be able to derail the process, they have to admit they're in control of it and that the ICANN board has been captured. The ICANN board is supposed to measure "community consensus" and implement policy. So far all they've demonstrated is that they measure trademark lawyer community consensus and have wasted thousand of man hours over the last decade stdying this and that. Domain registration is no better off than it was a decade ago, many would say it's worse and the thing ICANN was creatd to do: create new top level domains, has never happened.