Thanks for bringing a global perspective on the new gTLD legalese. Normally, a market regulator would promote competition and attempt to lower barriers to entry for new players. If your analysis about more demanding technical requirements for new entrants is correct, the ICANN strategy would be a fiasco! I did a similar analysis in the case of DNSSEC, but you seem to expand it to IPv6, EPP (registrar-registry interface), and IDN. My analysis implicitly used the electronic payment networks as a governance reference, in which mandatory standard compliance extends to operational aspects and external audits in order to sustain overall trust in the network. The voluntary vs mandatory compliance implications may be different in each of the four areas. But it is very likely that many RFC were drafted without paying much attention to mandatory compliance implications.