For better or worse, the applicant demonstrated sufficient sponsorship to ICANN's satisfaction. That FSC demonstrates that THEIR community doesn't buy in, doesn't necessarily negate the validity of the claim. Even the existence of a supportive sponsoring community does not guarantee success. (see ".aero")
As I said, ICANN's process is broken. In every case, the community that was allegedly supporting the gTLDs has voted with their feet and stayed away in droves, so the "support" does not in fact exist. Look at .AERO and .TRAVEL and .PRO and .JOBS and .COOP and poor old .MUSEUM. People hold up .CAT as a success, but Catalonia has about 7 million people, and .CAT has about 47,000 registrations. That's about the same population as Switzerland (about a million domains in .CH) or Hongkong (about 200,000 in .HK.) I presume we all know Einstein's quote about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly