Governing the Internet has quite rightly been compared to the task of herding cats. Internauts are a notoriously opinionated and fractious group and the process is usually conducted in the full glare of public scrutiny, subject to continuous, pointed and often intensely personal criticism from any interested party.
Power plays tend to fail, often spectacularly.
We believe in rough consensus and running code. Once upon a time, it cost nothing to register names in the top-level Internet domains. It also suggested up to 30 additional new registries and 90 iTLDs be authorized in each of the next five years. If the holder of a trademark contested ownership of a domain name, NSI would now suspend the registered domain name, removing it from the master Domain Name Service database until the dispute was resolved in a court of law. In practice, this meant that NSI took the side of the contesting party, regardless of the merits of its claim.