Becky,
is it consistent with and reasonably necessary to ensure the stability and security of the DNS?
If stability and security (let us address the "of what" separately) exhaust the requirements, then past actions, e.g., "shared access" to some existing registries and the associated namespaces (circa 1999), and "new gTLDs" and the associated namespaces (circa 2001, 2005, and 2013), all of which served to increase the number of actors with {read,write,modify} access to the data which supports the DNS, were not necessary. I'm indirectly revisiting my prior point that the pattern of behavior of the early adopters, from Kleinrock's published works -- which incorporates work that lead to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, and so the behavior of the USG, and later early adopters, to ICANN under its latest Board, and its latest contract with the USG, has been to provide access to subsequent adopters.
From this pattern of behavior, for which similar work in the UK academic community, and elsewhere, existed contemporaniously, which I trust we're not now deciding is outside the mission and/or scope of the Corporation, we can infer the existance of a public interest, held by several governments and research academic institutions, in extending access to the benefits of this particular stable mechanism of associating referants and resources -- an interest apparently shared by a sufficiently large body of end users of this system to make the attributive adjective "global" not nonsensical.
I suggest that the word "accessibility" or some cognate be added to the usual mantra of "security and stability", so we not shut the door on those who would like to use this system. Thank you for your patience reading this. Obviously, as there was public comment opposed to the Applicant Support Working Group's initial and final recommendations, prepared in response to a prior Board's call to form a cross community working group to consider how to assist 2013-round new gTLD applicants meeting some diversity goal, it is not impossible that its author(s) now argue that efforts to improve the accessibility of benefits made possible by the ongoing function of the Corporation fall outside the mission and/or scope of the Corporation. That the initial implementation of the ASWG's recommendations did not identify any applicant for "support" merely showed that the attempt to articulate a public interes must be improved upon, not proof that no public interest existed, as another CCWG-ACCT contributor observed. Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon