Because many people seem to be misinterpreting Namecoin's role, I'll quote the source:
The ICANN community appears to be reasonably accepting of Namecoin’s role as an alternative to DNS; Namecoin makes different tradeoffs from DNS, is therefore likely to be optimal for a different userbase, and can co-exist with DNS in its current state.
https://namecoin.org/2017/04/17/icann-58-summary.htmlThis means that ICANN recognizes Namecoin as an alternative and doesn't want to interfere. The developers would like to avoid a "collision" that'd cause .bit ending up becoming an ICANN TLD.
Honestly, and without offense, some people seem to be misinterpreting icann's role.
edit to add
After I posted that I noticed another post I had made in a moderated thread was deleted, and my reaction is to simply discredit the person trying to control the conversation through 'moderation' of other peoples' comments.
Speech, conversation, etc can be very useful, it has importance. But when it is hijacked by one special interest then it becomes trivial. A person is free to surf through icann's world wide web. They can find a lot of good sites and a lot of bad sites. The one thing though they can count on, is that any sites that offend major commercial interests in the United States will be taken down by icann. Is that really what the internet should be about?
