I think an extreme circumstance would be someone hijacking microsoft.com and trying to ransom it off but I'm not really familiar with ICANN's specific powers.

I think an extreme circumstance would be someone hijacking microsoft.com and trying to ransom it off but I'm not really familiar with ICANN's specific powers. Why should everyone in the world not get to use a thing because Microsoft has some naming scheme? These places have been shouting whatever data at a random (edit: unintentional and uncontrolled rather than random) spot on the internet for years and that's a huge problem. Opening up an auction is a nice way to draw attention to the problem, get MS to literally&figuratively pay for it (even if the price 10x'd it's not like M$ couldn't handle $17MM), and make it no longer the seller's problem.