Is this necessarily the right move? I have a vague recollection of reading about Singapore and their approach to attaining top talent to the public sector with high wages. I could be totally wrong!
You want people who don't need to play the game and buddy up to people if they want to improve their lot. You don't want people who see the role as a stepping stone to "better things".
1. High bar to get a job.
2. Modest, but livable salary.
3. Long-term job stability.
This guarantees you don't really need to worry about money (unless you're super-greedy), but at the same time, no one was in it for the money. It broke when elite university compensation went astronomical ($1 million plus at the top-end), and job stability went away (no reasonable paths to tenure, and lots of adjunct / postdoc / research scientists / etc. positions).
With competition, the easiest way to land a tenured job is to lie and cheat. With high compensation, there are all the wrong reasons to do it. As a result, several elite schools are now cesspools of corruptions, academic misconduct, and (most legal but unethical) embezzlement.
We should go back to where:
* Jobs are stable
* Salaries are modest, but cover food+housing+basic essentials
* Benefits are strong
I'd say something similar is true for other not-for-profits. There are tons of exceptionally smart, competent, caring people who want jobs which provide meaning and have a positive impact on the world. To take them, they want to be able to feed their families. To stay there, you don't need to guarantee high income, so much as high stability.
That this decision was made in the first place, and that ICANN took so long to withhold consent, shows that there are not enough stewards in either organization.
Holding meetings in far flung and hard to get to places was one tactic