Actually, in ICANN's narrow context, it might well be interpreted that way.

ICANN's mandate is about trust, stability and security of the DNS, everything it does supposedly stems from that. It's not within ICANN's remit to make value judgments on the inherent value of anything being open and non-commercial. Yes, that means plenty to us, but when confronted with that demand ICANN can just ignore it as out of scope. Its history of extreme risk-aversion make it easy for ICANN's board to take advice from its legal counsel that may silently override any emotional or ethical arguments.

But that does not mean we have nothing to say, it's just how we say it.

ICANN's interest in the public good for its own sake is hard to come by. So IMO our job, should we choose to accept it, is to paint the ISOC abandonment of .ORG as an issue of stability, trust and security, so it's directly in scope. Something that was assumed to be stable no longer is, an assumed endowment of a rare resource is now being treated as a commodity, and the secrecy of the transaction gives rise to potentially more instability, especially if new owners prices or policies push registrants away en-masse to other TLDs.