Or they could do nothing, since they have no legal obligation to do anything....

...unless the unspoken third alternative is redelegation or poor IANA service.

But didn't the US Government make clear via an amendment of the MOU and various other signals that it absolutely would not stand for gaming the ccTLD's IANA support? I thought ICANN got that message loud and clear.

Unless something has changed since WSIS -- and I suppose ICANN might overconfidently mis-perceive that it has -- isn't this rather unlikely?

Yes, you're right. It's unlikely that ICANN would expressly condition IANA support on an "accountability" relationship. The USG made this clear during WSIS, and I know that the message was heard by ICANN. In practice, I suspect it's hard to measure whether IANA shows preferential treatment for some entities over others. I also don't know what other pressures ICANN is under to bring ccTLDs managers into some sort of alignment on "accountability."

As I've noted elsewhere, I think that it is important to recognise that possibly each ccTLD will have a different approach to this issue. This will based on our own political and government context, our own risk analysis, our own organisational pressures (or lack of them) and the extent to which we each have in-house lawyers or funds to spend on lawyerly advice:o) I suspect that the current apparent 'choice' between two options will develop over time and as a result of discussion and debate. If it helps, we view the letters as a 'menu' from which one may choose to suit - or alternatively one may decide to be on a diet and not eat at all.

It's a mistake to look at ccTLDs as a block. They appear to me to have only two characteristics in common -- their ccTLDs have two letters, and that they are susceptible to the same sorts of shenanigans that ICANN regularly gets up to. See my post on the net LOSS of TLDs since ICANN took over, thanks to power politics by ccTLD administrators, with ICANN's acquiescence: http://www.namesatwork.com/blog/2006/01/28/net-loss-of-top-level-domains/