Becky, My appologies for not picking this nit earlier.
"To what extent should contracted parties be free to propose or voluntarily accept (and obligated to comply with) contract provisions that exceed the scope of ICANN's Mission, e.g., to serve a specific community, pro-actively address a public policy concern?
When I wrote one of the several proposals that came out of Working Group C - new gTLDs Interim Report, October 23th, 1999 [1], it was for the purpose of providing service to a specific community. Later the concept of a Sponsoring Organization capable of suplementing the (then rather sparse) requirements of ICANN's registry contracts with additional policy goals and mechanisms was incorporated into the Sponsored TLD, then referred to as "sTLD" form pursued by the applicants for .aero, .coop, and .museum, among the original "6-10" applications selected for the 2000 round of new TLDs by (a very much smaller) staff. For completeness, these 2000 round appliccations were for sponsored TLDs: .air, .biz, .co-op, .dir, .dubai, .event, .fin, .geo, .health, .kids, .mas, .mus, .nom, .post, .tel, .travel, and .union. Note that .air became .aero, .co-op became .coop, and .mus became .museum, and the sponsored .biz application came from an applicant other than JVTeam. Subesequently, in the 2004 round several of these were approved: .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel and .travel. The nit I'm picking is "... provisions that exceed the scope of ICANN's Mission, e.g., to serve a specific community ...", as that has been broadly seen as within ICANN's Mission, until this moment. Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon [1] http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/19991023.NCwgc-report.html#Position%20Paper%2...