Template:Acronym of the Week 2016/19
Public Interest Commitments (PICs) as related to new gTLD applicants and the Registry Agreement they are to sign, is a term and creation directly from ICANN, first suggested on February 5th, 2013, in ICANN's revised new registry agreement that it opened for public comments.
PICs are voluntary amendments that applicants can create, sign, and undertake along with the general registry agreement in order to hold their registry operations to certain standards. They seem to originally have been developed as a way to allow applicants to appease GAC members that may be concerned about how their application stands as is, or how ICANN will be able to ensure a potential registry remains compliant with its aspirations and mandate as it defined in its summary of its proposed operations in the TLD application. Prior to PICs, there was no clear way of defining operating procedures when moving from the long form essays in the TLD application to the Registry Agreement.