The 12 months is more than long enough to get a permanent operator assigned to run the TLD if the emergency operator isn't going to continue doing so. ICANN isn't just going to let an entire TLD's worth of domain names fall off the face of the Internet. This isn't theoretical either; they already went through it for .wed: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/next-steps-for-the-we...