Although I can definitely understand where Dharma is coming from, I would have to agree with Evan. I get around 100 e-mails per day off of various discussion lists and such. If discussions get way off topic then it becomes really tedious trying to weed out the wheat from the chaff.
I can tell you from experience that when lists wander away from their nominal topic, people stop reading them. The handful of people doing the wandering rarely notice. ICANN has a long-standing problem with magical thinking, people assuming that ICANN can solve their favorite Internet-related problem even though it has nothing to do with TLDs or IP address allocation. Rural access and the like are real problems, but there's nothing ICANN can do about them. ICANN has enormous trouble dealing with the tiny range of issues it does address, and it would be a really good idea if we tried to keep ICANN lists for ICANN issues so we can have some hope of making progress on those issues. R's, John