On Mar 10, 2012, at 6:38 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
The more telling fallacy here that really speaks to the heart of why I am dismayed and disappointed by ICANN's management of the whole TLD mess is the idea that a CCTLD is the property of a TLD operator to begin with.
Your dismay and disappointment may be relieved by doing a bit of research. Management of country code top-level domains is treated by ICANN as national sovereignty issue. ICANN has limited say in who runs a ccTLD (it must be done according to the wishes of the "local Internet community") and technical matters related to how that ccTLD is managed (e.g., ICANN, through the IANA root management functions places certain (minimal) technical requirements on the operation of the TLD name servers).
The .IN TLD is property of the Indian people or worst case, the government of India acting in their stead. (or at least it should be if ICANN and/or Verisign and their competitors haven't managed to completely usurp the public trust.
You might want to read RFC 1591, ICP-1, and/or the ICANN GAC principles before passing judgement. Regards, -drc