One note, when i say that anything that acts like a gTLD should be under the same set of rules, I am not necessarily specifying what that set of rules is.
Agreed, the rules should be fair and the same for all players. I don't yet even see listed any agreement or MoU for several of the ccTLDs in question (ex. .tv, .me, .co) in http://www.icann.org/en/cctlds/agreements.html.
Though I guess I still am too much of a Barlowite, to accept the notion of sovereignty over domain names as natural law. Next thing you know there will be claims of sovereignty over oxygen.
I'll dig later for some specific historic references, During the transition to the DNS after the creation of initial TLDs, there was general consensus around the idea of and country TLDs and Jon Postel liked it, but there was a heated discussion because he didn't like end being responsible to decide what constituted or not a country. While .UK was started to being used for Great Britain (notice that the actual ISO-3166 is .GB) and .US for United States, some folks suggested to take a look at what ISO was doing and that ended with the adoption of ISO-3166 alpha2 and later on the following statement in RFC1591. "The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list." After the use of ISO-3166 was settled, Jon just looked for people willing and able to act as volunteers to handle and manage each of the ccTLDs, it was first come first serve basis, that's how ccTLDs ended in the hands of primarily universities, research projects, some forgotten govt office, individuals or small companies. In the case of .AR (where I was the tech/admin for several years since we assumed that role ~1987) it landed on a small project sponsored by UNDP that was responsible for the implementation of modern IT and communications infrastructure for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we were like external contractors and there was not much clue about what role we assumed being the ccTLD manager, it took until 2005 for the AR govt to put in writing the role of the Ministry in relation to the .AR ccTLD. Besides the reactions to avoid the politiks of defining what is or not a country, I don't remember any original discussions about sovereignty but RFC1591 included another important sentence about the designated manager of a TLD: "The designated manager is the trustee of the top-level domain for both the nation, in the case of a country code, and the global Internet community." It is a shame that in the epoch of ICANN, the original spirit and the sentence that follows the one mentioned above has apparently been lost ... "Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are inappropriate. It is appropriate to be concerned about "responsibilities" and "service" to the community." I'm sorry, but somebody ate your pony ... Regards Jorge