However, that does not mean that the advice that they are receiving is good. Some of the opposition is upset because of the deadlock that has gripped the Internet for the last two years. IANA made a fundamental error in turning over the gTLD question to a small group of people, however good the intentions of those people were. This error led directly to two years of DNS wars. The DNS wars were the result of poor advice, miscalculations, and basic misunderstandings.
Wars usually are.
The problem here is that those arguing for a closed solution appear to have learned nothing from their last mistake. What has happened over the last few years, what lay behind the DNS wars, is a collision at many levels between the Internet and the world at large. Where the questions involved are purely technical, the Internet has won. But where the emerging reality of the Internet has collided with vested commercial, political, and legal interests it has not. Or to put it another way, where the technical skills represented by the IETF and the IAB have been critical, they have won.