The request by .post to change their contract and the registry/registrar model probably has a lot to do with it. I complained that people weren't paying this enough attention on the ICANN blog in October: http://blog.icann.org/?p=203 I think it would also be a good wrt new gTLDs. If Google, for example, applied for ".google" - which would be a perfectly fair application as far as I understand - the company would probably complain it was a little unreasonable to make it pay $6 for sub-domains in its own TLD when it can add them directly to the DNS for $0. But that's me extrapolating. I'm pretty sure this has to do with the .post issue. You know if you asked this question directly on ICANN's public participation website, I'd feel duty-bound to ask people within the organisation what the explanation was. Kieren