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.biz Domain Lottery on Hold
kikta writes: "CNN is reporting that the lottery for the .biz domain appear to be in trouble. A judge barred the lottery and ordered the company, NeuLevel Inc., to set aside $3 million for possible refunds."
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I think it was first come first serve. McDonalds and several other big corporations went after thier domain names in court IIRC, and won them. This made lots of money for lawyers, and cost everyone else big bucks, and wasted time in the legal system. I guess what it comes down to is that copyright holders should get first refusal on a domain name, and after that its up for dibbs. Sounds like a logistical nightmare to me.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
From what I've seen, a lot of the contested .biz registrations are between legitimate Trademark holders and what are effectively domain squatters. I've seen at least one San Francisco based company issueing requests for (various versions of major hardware vendor).biz addresses in conflict with said major vendor's own legitimate claim.
I wouldn't be overly surprised to see this company, and others, doing this specifically to make money down the road by trying to sell the names back to the trademark holders.
Honestly, cocacola.biz (for example) should legitimately go to them...
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
I think the illegality lies in the fact that although it is advertised to be a fair, random chance of getting a contested name, in reality the deck can be stacked by people with enough money to submit applications through many different registrars (and possibly under a different registrant name).
It's the difference between a raffle where everyone gets one ticket, versus a raffle where everyone gets a single ticket by default but you can buy more at $50 a piece. Hence the more money invested, the higher the chance you will win the prize. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but I guess that fact was not made clear to the participants.
... because nobody cares about .biz domains anyway. They won't get any respect, since all the companies people care about already have .com addresses. People will view .biz domains as late-comers and hangers-on. Which probably isn't far from the truth.
- kengineer
Honestly though, a person or organization should be allowed 1 domain and 1 domain only and anything else that they want should be below that. If you are coke.com thats all you get, if you want a million servers name the rest of them *.coke.com but you can't have coke2.com. Then maybe we would be somewhere even resonably close to being able to satisfy the demand for unique rememberable domain names.
In the current world there isn't a way to distrubute names that will satisfy everyone because there are too many people to satisfy. You could say that Mr. David Coke has a more valid claim to coke.com than the Coke company does, I mean david didn't even get to choose his name. In the end the people with the most money will win, and I think thats something we will have to live with. In our world it just doesn't matter what way you distribute the names initially they will all concentrate at the top of the food chain anyways.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Nobody. None of this is property, even in an abstract intellectual sense. It is all really just about contracts (however indirect) with ICANN (whose "authority" is completely defacto), ultimately coming down to what ICANN's servers are going to server when they service requests sent to them.
And if you send your DNS request to someone else's servers you may indeed get very different answers to the same query. foo.biz can point to two completely different hosts, depending on who you ask. Therefore, .biz
is not property, and it makes no more sense to talk of someone owning
a domain than it makes sense to say someone owns "SELECT * FROM FOO"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Gambling, by definition, is a game directly based on an element of chance. The stock market is based directly on the abilities of companies to generate more money from an inital capital investment. The majority of investment is done by large companies that invest on the basis of significant research.
:)
So horse racing isn't based on the ability of one horse to run faster than the other, or for trainers to train their particular horse to run faster?
Ah fuck it, it's late, I've been at the pub, I probably missed your point
Arrgghh! And whilst I'm ranting, IMHO, when people register names, they should have a funtional website up within 3 months or lose their registration so we can cut back on the domain squatting.
This proposal is often made by people who either don't know or refuse to think about how the Internet works.
Say I register a (non-contested) personal domain name in order to have a neat e-mail address, and maybe run an FTP server and stuff like that, and I have no intention of putting up any website, much less a functional one. Would that make me a domain squatter?
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota