.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."

Comments

The problem...

[Bagheera]

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...

Domains are un-ownable, especially .biz

[Sloppy]

It occurs to me to ask... who owns .biz?

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"