The proposals favouring auctions fail to understand that commercial exploitation is not necessarily the thing to be maximized in [all] new TLDs. For example, would you give .redcross to a firm in Japan or Canada rather than to the Red Cross, just because the former can put more money on the table? In case strings have strong semantic meanings, people expect them to be managed by a "legitimate" entity in a broad and inclusive way, rather than to be given to someone to squeeze as much money as possible out of them. What is "legitimate" is another matter, but certainly it is not money that creates legitimacy to steward a global public resource such as a gTLD.