Sorry, but that just doesn’t make any sense legally. It is a good statement of purpose from your perspective, but it isn’t an operational statement. I was heartened to see you try and identify some other provisions of American law that you think ICANN should be immune from (most of which, by the way, do not involve the vagaries of US foreign policy and so contradict your purpose statement – but that is another issue). Let’s focus on that.
US executive agencies have routinely considered the DNS as a legitimate lever to exercise its coercive powers. Especially for entities outside the US that it seeks to impact, and who are provided DNS service from an entity within the US, it has unhesitatingly employed US jurisdiction over the US based DNS provider to pull the DNS plug on the “erring non US based entities”.
Please see the below news reports on hundreds of such cases.
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/
http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2010/11/seizing-domain-names-without-coica.html
ICANN, as a US non profit, is no different than a US-based registry or registrar located in the US, in terms of how a US authority can and will employ it for coercive actions against “errant entities”. Since most entities use a .com, .net, etc domain name, till now the means of enforcement have been
through the corresponding registries, mostly Verisign. However, in case of gTLDs operated by a registry outside the US, ICANN alone can provide the means of coercive action – that of disabling the gLTD. There is no question that, as Verisign has so often been forced by US agencies to disable
domain names, sooner or later so will ICANN be forced. Doing this just to uphold US law would constitute a constraint on ICANN's responsibility to act in the interest of global Internet community.
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Can you explain why a prospective application of OFAC over a cctld or gtld is a problem (which I think it very much is) but the likely problems with US Customs seizing a gTLD through ICANN is not (when very symmetrical actions have taken place earlier)?