I agree with Alan's explanation and logic but believe it to be irrelevant within a larger picture. To the GAC -- at least certain specific members whose numbers are surely growing -- any repudiation of GAC consensus advice will undermine ICANN within the eyes of governments who, at the end of the day, have final authority (whether the "empowered community" likes it or not). I remind that governments have no, zero, obligation to respect ICANN's policies and activities. There is no treaty that binds anyone to respect the decision-making process, and I would argue that at this particular time ICANN is an extremely fragile situation. The foreign influence of US-based institutions is at what seems an all-time low. And we are now starting to see cracks in the openness of the Internet as governments increasingly throttle or block traffic deemed undesirable. Many supposedly-open societies do this too, though their targets are commercial (ie, copyright infringers) rather than political -- for now. In other words, attacks by governments on the free Internet are at unprecedented levels and ICANN is now poised to poke a sharp stick in their collective eye. If ICANN's Board has any sanity they will redress the components that caused the reconsideration but come to the same conclusion. The last thing they need is to be seen as defending the interest of a local-jobs-destroying US-based multinational over those of a national government of a smaller country with rebuilding challenges. Paint this as multi-national versus multi-lateral and ICANN loses big. At a certain point it seems to come down to the demand of national governments to explain their decisions and rationale to the satisfaction of ICANN. Such explantions are not owed, indeed it is ICANN that needs to be earning the respect of governments and not the other way around. ICANN is not the bastion of an open Internet, though it may be seen as that from inside the bubble. It is an industry-captured organization that has used one of the Internet's trusted resources -- domain names -- to extract value from the Internet and empower entire business sectors based on fraud and speculation. It never had much capacity for moral suasion and has even less now. This is not the time nor the reason to pick a fight with governments. Overruling a previous agreement -- especially based on technicalities -- is lose-lose. - Evan