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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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It is standard practice to hold a lottery for contested domain names? I don't recall when the .com and .net started up, but did they run lotteries for "popular" domain names?
I say first come, first serve... just seems to be a way to make more money
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
The thing that irritates me the most is that the article doesn't say what part of the lottery might be illegal. I'd also be interested to know if NeuLevel is allowed to take more entries for the domain names.
What I mean is, if I've applied for ldopa.biz with two other people, and the lottery has been stopped, what happens to my request? What if someone else wants to register it now? Can they register it, or is it taken, even though it isn't yet taken.
Also, how is a lottery illegal, but bidding for a domain name isn't? I can buy ldopa1's-house-of-smackdown.com and auction it off on Ebay if I want to.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
I called the company last month to see if our corporate domain had been requested by someone else, and they wouldn't tell me if anyone had or not, and that the only way to be sure I'd get the
What a scam......
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 can imagine now cybersquatters happy because they "won" a .biz domain, and because this would, after a fashion, legitimize their activity.
I'll go place a $1 bid for mcdonalds.biz - if I win, I can go offer McDonalds the domain for $10.000. If they sue me, I can retort by stating I got the domain in a legitimate way.
It may or not be illegal - but it sure as hell is stupid.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
This makes sense. The web has been wild for too long... the race-for-a-plot-of-land mentality surrounding domain registration couldn't last forever, and frankly has no place in a saner, more mature (read: less exciting) WWW. This is the next logical step, and a welcome one in my opinion.
The 'net mentality that turned whitehouse.com into a porn site is one whose time should end.
Contested
And why are these fees being charged at all? There's no significant additional processing required to resolve each of these disputes, and the initial price of registration should be sufficient to cover this eventuality. Charging the fee doesn't discourage claims after the fact, and all the information has already been collected by neulevel. It wouldn't be the first or last time a quasi-legal organization has bilked consumers, but there's still no excuse for it.
The article doesn't mention an extremely important fact: what the judge actually found wrong with the lottery. It is also extremely interesting that the person who filed the suit to stop the lottery was attempting to get a .biz domain. Personally I feel that he was just trying to get a free/cheap domain, and skirt the lottery. Of course it is possible that I'm wrong, but without more information, I cannot tell.
-mrbkap
After I collect interest on investing it.
Hell, $3M compounding 10% per annum calculated monthly would net $314 000 in interest.
That's a decent enough annual income. Howzabout you all loan me some money for a year or two? I *promise* I'll give it back!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
For NeuLevel
neulevel.outof.biz
I want the list of applicants for a .biz domain. That way, I can make sure that I have no money invested in them, for clearly they will be going out of ".bizness" due to a complete lack of sense.
www.eFax.com are spammers
is that they were charging people to "enter the lottery" for contested names. That just doesn't sit right with me; they get your money whether you "win" the domain or not.
Let's consider it. For popular, "hotly contested" domains, dozens (maybe hundreds? who knows?) of people may throw their money in for a chance at it. Now, I'm not going to say the people who actually do this are terribly bright to begin with (the more popular the domain, the more people who'll bid), but it just seems too much for me.
Aside from the implications in trademark law (not that I actually support the bogus trademark/domain claims that some companies make these days), it seems dumb to go through this nasty process when you *could* just register a different (maybe even similar) domain for a lower cost anyhow.
The steady flow of spam mails praising the advantages of a .biz domain has come to a point where it is even higher than the number of mails trying to convince me to buy a penis enlarger or to increase my (hairy) breast size. Now one can win a friggin' .biz domain at a lottery. Does that mean we'll soon see happy winners of the [fill-in-your-state]-lottery walk away with the latest John-Holmes-kit(tm)?
The whole organisation of the .info and .biz tld's all seems to be crap. Here in New Zealand ,an Australian company managing the .biz & .info domains managed to extract from their partnering .nz registrar a mailing list of every .nz nameholder. They then mailed (physcial mail, not email) this list of people telling them that they should secure their domain by paying $250 to them. Only if you read the finer print did you actually find out that this cost was to secure a .biz or .info version of your domain and that it didnt actually secure it at all.
.info tld has opened for business, and we only seem to see crap, hastily put up websites around, or carbon copies of the equivelant .com or .co.uk etc. Although all these new tld's are probably a good idea, I think the organisers went about things in the wrong way.
Since then, the
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.
on anything but .coms. For some reason people seem to think being a copyright holder forbids anyone else from using that name...wrong
.com was for commercial enterprises, the remaining TLD's should be up for grabs. The only way the copyright holder should be given precedence is when there is a question of competition in a like market, or someone is trying to make a buck of someone else's name.
#1 it only applies to like business or competing enterprises I believe.
#2
McDonald's.org should have NOTHING to do with the resturants unless Micky D's has the org for the ronaldmacdonald house, a valid charity.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Ok, forget about .biz, .info, .whatever. The heart of the problem is with the institution called "ICANN". Who ever made ICANN the governing body of domains and the internet structure as we know it? Seems to me they sort of self appointed themselves and now have a system in place to keep their little hierarchy afloat...
.biz .info etc...
I think a total reorganization is called for, something akin to the United Nations but for ruling and policing the World Wide Web. Its not called the World Wide Web for nothing. There are no political or geographic boundaries.
I propose that we create an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium. Each country who has a cctld would elect or appoint two representatives from their country. Also to make things more fair the countries with the largest Internet presence would form a sub-group within this framework much like the security council within the U.N.
As a whole this body would then make decisions about country domains and new TLD's like the
There would be no one company controlling a monopoly such as Network Solutions (ie. Verisign) or Affilias or NeuBiz. These companies might be contracted however the in the long term best interests, the organization and administration of TLD's should be directly handled the WWWC.
Just some food for thought...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I work for a company a lot of people love to hate, and we're pretty protective of our marks, but not to the point of registering the *sucks.com versions of our marks (thanks largely to me).
.biz TLD, and that many Fortune 500 companies were putting in 1000 or more applications for the major marks, and 100-500 for their minor marks. For only $5 per application, our registrar was willing to make the applications for our marks on our behalf. Well isn't that nice.
.biz or in .info. Of course, being famous, all our applications have been contested, and are subject to this "lottery". Our lawyers simply realized that no matter what the outcome of the lottery, our marks are still our marks and the winner does not win the right to infringe.
:)
We got a message from our registrar (who shall go nameless) telling us that we had a few more weeks to get our "applications" in for our marks under the
Our attorneys (who turn to me whenever confronted with anything remotely technical, guess I'm lucky that way) have decided not to pursue any additional applications, in
They used to tell me "go register this domain for us please, it's cheaper than sending a cease & desist letter." This time however, they decided that sending a C&D to the "winner" is going to cost much less than playing along with the silly lottery.
They also associate ICANN and NSI with increased workload due to all these nuisance issues that come up with domains. I have educated them well.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I propose that we create an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium.
There is already an organization by that (appropriate) name, they are at the obvious URL, doing the obvious standards-setting things regarding the world wide web.
Furthermore, since DNS != HTTP, and the Internet != The Web, the name you propose is badly misleading.
ICANN, by the way, is exactly the sort of organization you propose. Thanks, but no thanks. Been there, done that, didn't even get a T-shirt.
Edith Keeler Must Die
NeuLevel was in the wrong.
They were going to make a killing at everyone else's expense.
Since cybersquatters can no longer hold trademarked names it would be worthless for them to go out and register every trademark domain name.
They should quit releasing one extension at a time to create extra demand. They should release tons of extensions all at once and let buyers be creative. If they want to setup certain rules for certain extensions that's fine, but letting people buy the rights to be in an auction just doesn't seem right.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
ICANN-
.INFO and .BIZ TLD launches more than I ever thought possible - I couldn't have done it any better if I'd tried. As a result you have saved us many individuals, businesses, governments, etc who operate services in the legacy gTLDs (.COM, .NET, .ORG) much money - no need for us to register duplicate domains in every new TLD when they are poorly managed, unreliable, and unpopular with the public.
:-)
Your organization fouled up the
And as an added benefit, any new TLDs that come down the pike will be tainted and present relatively little threat and thus saving all of us even more money - but really ICANN, we both know the deal here...the introduction of new TLDs was designed to fail - real businesses, etc already have the domains they need in the legacy gTLDs and/or can afford to acquire the domains they need - there's really no need to add TLDs other than to make it look like ICANN was doing something, while in reality just maintaining status quo.
Thanks again ICANN
Rip offs like this makes me wish that every DNS was shut off and everyone had to type in IP addresses.
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.
Of course, if you do that, J Random DomainSquatter will just have all of his domains point to 1 place.
Screw it! Let's just shut off DNS.
Sorry... Just a bad day dealing with $registration_company.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Since this is a lottery, (you pay to play, and you don't get your $$$ back if you lose, and it's random), and it's done over the Net, isn't this a form of Internet Gambling, which the Senate just voted to outlaw in the USA Act?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I can't believe people are even signing up for this domain in the first place.
.biz and .info that netizens would be far too intelligent to buy into them. However, I guess I overestimated their intelligence.
.com names. They figure if they get a good domain name, someone will eventually pay them big bucks for it. However, .biz will NEVER have the same consumer-friendly ring to it that .com does, and people need to realize that before they purchase one of these absolutely idiotic domain names.
My initial reaction when I started to get the hundreds of spam emails for
I think the main problem here is that a LOT of people are still looking to make a quick buck like people did in the mid 90s with
and agree UNLESS some company in the same line of business etc. tries to use the name. The trademark holders SHOULD have DIBS to their name where it applies to the field they are in. As for the TM holders getting a name from a private individual using it NOT in competition with the owners, then first come first serve I say. Of course we all know money talks and few can compete with the monetary largess of a corporation in any field :(
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
According to the NeuLevel, Inc. web site:
I'd like to know when this particular date is supposed to be.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
All the problems with trademarks and domain names is based on spin and lies.
The United States Department of Commerce and the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization know the solution.
The US DoC, USPTO and even the UK Patent Office do not deny the assertions put to them.
The authorities have been using lies and propaganda; As example, ask them to deny this:
THOUSANDs of new open TLDs will not solve any problem - even if every one has 'Sunrise Period'
It will not solve 'consumer confusion', 'trademark conflict' or stop anybody 'passing off'.
Also, as an example on Sunrise, thousands of trademarks using word 'Apple' have no guarantee of being able to use name.
Apple computers will still protect and make claim to every Apple.[anything] - even though they share word with 727 others in the USA alone (plus all those in 200+ countries).
The solution to domain name and trademark problems is at WIPO.org.uk .
Anybody registering a .biz, will be in for an interesting time. You see there is nothing to stop anyone from running their own TLD, all you need is to set up DNS on a computer, connect it to the internet and have people use it for DNS (that's actualy the hard part).
.biz tld has been in use for quite some time now, well before ICANN had decided to open up their own .biz TLD, and when ICANN activates their .biz TLD there are going to be collisions in name resolution. poiuyt.com has a short blurb about it and links to more authoritative content. Several of the alternative NIC's have banned to gether and resolve each other's name spaces, It's interesting that these other guys play nice with each other while the official DNS acts like the school yard bully. What happens when you "win" your favored .biz name and someone else can prove that they've had it and used it complete with traffic logs for several years? who do you complain to when your domain resolves to two seperate IP addresses?
Well the
Things are going to be interesting, stay tuned for more!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds