ICANN has published another set of comments and responses on the ICANN-Verisign agreement. The answers are helpful. Even if you don't necessarily agree with the statements ICANN makes (and I don't), at least we now have some sense of the ICANN Staff's view on all of this.

Taken together, ICANN's responses point to something bigger and more fundamental than the terms of the .COM Registry Agreement: ICANN's current management has a fundamentally different view than that of its predecessors about how ICANN should work, how big it should be, and how it should be funded.

The problem, however, is that these new policy pronouncements are a tangle of contradictions. For example, while saying that ICANN should make "a transition to allowing market forces to determine prices" by lifting the price caps, ICANN immunizes Verisign from those same market forces through the perpetual renewal provision. (It might have been stuck with the favored renewal provision, but the lifting of the caps is ICANN's own decision.) While lightening some of ICANN's enforcement responsibilities by greater reliance on market forces, ICANN doesn't propose to lighten its own budget at the same time. In fact, it does the opposite. I'll try to tease out more of these issues in the coming days, but for now, these Qs and As are worth reading.