Reading through the report at Heise, it all sounds rather like collusion in favor of VeriSign - the biggest rip-off merchant in the domain business. Pretty absurd, the whole allocation, if indeed the company that has been accused of unfair practices in recent times (pre-registration of IDN domains without basis, wildcard A-record on .com) gets the contract. I suspect the problem with deNic was simply that it is not a US company, because Internet administration is still far too US-centric.