Here's the hypothetical floated by Werner Staub. Next year, after ICANN issues its expected Request for Proposals for new gTLDs, a group of Australian Rules Football afficianados, or perhaps even the official governing body of the Australian sport, proposes a ".FOOTBALL." Under the proposal, the TLD would be operated as a sponsored TLD exclusively for the use of the Australian Rules Football community. ICANN receives no other applications for ".FOOTBALL." Under the application review funnel we are considering, ".FOOTBALL" then would be awarded to the Australian applicant. Should that happen? 
A couple of people voiced the concern that this would confuse users. If ."FOOTBALL" is going to be a sponsored TLD, they said, the sponsor should be FIFA, not a group from Australia. This example provoked a chuckle, especially on the eve of the U.S. football season. If you had asked me a year ago to guess whether "FIFA" was the official organizing body of "football" or the name of a poodle, I'd have gone with the pooch. What Werner calls "football," I call "soccer." Our different definitions and uses of the word illustrate the difficulties posed by allocating words on a worldwide basis to a single use....which is what happens with "sponsored" or "restricted" TLDs. If .FOOTBALL is an open, unsponsored TLD, anyone in the world can register a name and use it for any purpose. If .FOOTBALL is a sponsored TLD for Australian Rules Football teams, then it necessarily excludes soccer and real football. Is that acceptable?
ICANN clearly thinks so. Over the objection of a well-known travel writer, ICANN allocated .TRAVEL to a sponsoring organization that excludes travel writers. And just last year, it allocated .CAT to the Catalan language community.
I wonder if we can find a better path, and Werner's hypothetical got me thinking.
While I have no trouble with ICANN allocating .TRAVEL to the travel booking community or .CAT to the Catalan language community, I do wonder about the exclusivity of the allocations. If these words or strings have distinct meanings to communities of people in the world, perhaps the strings should be shared. I'm thinking of something similar to the petition process for creating new GNSO constituencies. If your group independently can meet the standards for sponsorship and also establish that the current registry sponsor excludes your group from registration, then ICANN can grant your group eligibility for registration in the TLD. Why couldn't the Catalan language community and the Cat fanciers of the world share .CAT?
I'm sure this approach has problems of its own, but isn't it worth considering how to ensure that some words don't become the exclusive domain of small segments of the world's population?
