Continuing the discussion started by Adam and Vittorio:
if there's enough coming from it, but no one tasked ICANN with being the Treasure Ministry of the Internet, let alone deciding how to redistribute money from the "undeserving" to the "deserving".
Too late. Already done with .ORG. Decision made purely on the grounds of who was most deserving, technical criteria met by many applicants. ISOC revenues now some millions of dollars each year.
Actually, there is a huge difference. The decision on awarding a contract following rebid of .org was completely in the scope of ICANN. Of course, many might not be happy with that decision (and I sense that Adam is one of them). Others are not happy with the result of the rebid of .com, including several ICANN Board members. And I bet many are not happy with some ccTLD delegation or redelegation. But in all those cases ICANN made a choice that it was clearly mandated to do: you might disagree with the choice, but not on the fact that it was in ICANN's scope to take it. OTOH, the allocation of valuable SLDs, like single character domains, is a brand new task. As such, we need to consider it with much more care. The question might not only be whether the method used, or the choice of the beneficiary, pleases the internet community, but even if this does not configures itself like a whole new domain, the implications of which are much wider than the redelegationb of a TLD. Cheers, Roberto