ICANN’s board rejected seven GNSO recommendations which it considered “would not be in the best interests of the ICANN community or ICANN”, as part of an update in mid-September. One of those recommendations which was very relevant to dotBrands, both current ones and future applications, was related to a request that single-registrant TLDs would no longer be contractually required to monitor for abuse within their zone.
The GNSO had presented an argument that such single-registrant applications do not suffer abuse as it stood, and continued to actively monitor for abuse within their zone, providing abuse monitoring reports to ICANN on request. However, the ICANN board concluded that “Recommendation 9.2, if implemented, could lead to DNS abuse for second-level registrations in a single-registrant TLD going unaddressed, unobserved, and unmitigated,”.
You can read more about how dotBrands provide a zero-abuse name space here.