"The problem with CNCF and why istio was not transferred to that org is that CNCF acts as a mediator, so any decision around trademark takes soo much time and effort because CNCF has to get the blessing of everyone or build something neutral (like the k8s certification), and it's in their best interest that things are complicated as they can make money out of that."

This article paints a more accurate picture of the situation where Google broke its promises to its partners, you should ask them why they did that: https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/09/ibm_oracle_cncf_prote...

Also, I believe people have been asking Istio to develop a conformance program for years and moving it to CNCF which had a track record of building one of the most successful open source conformance programs seemed reasonable: https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance

If not CNCF, there are other fantastic open source foundations like the ASF, EF, OSI, SPI and so on that could have helped.