CircleID

Business environment changes rapidly as do consumer choice. We cannot expect business to start offering unprofitable services just to proof a point.

It is better to acknowledge a mistake and fix it quickly.

Absolutely, James - once the testbed is over and new competition is allowed. Otherwise, you invalidate the testbed and give more protected-market advantages to existing players.

That's hardly fair (and in some markets might even be illegal)

On the other hand, .name has already been approved for second-level registrations, a modification from the original agreement; it would be unfair to allow that while denying other TLDs' similar modification requests.

Indeed. I believe that the approval for .name was wrong, just as the approval for .pro was wrong.

the "testbed" goal is really to find out if we can have more TLDs (remember some were arguing back then we can have millions of TLDs?) and more importantly to me, will it bring competition to NSOL.

While ICANN have not release any official results of this testbed, I believe the first goal has been successfully demostrated but the latter is unfortunately quite disappointing.