.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

What's illegal about it?

[ldopa1]

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.

Re:What's illegal about it?

[technos]

How is it different?

Ebay doesn't make you pay to bid and lose. Neulevel does, from $2-15.

On Ebay, you win if you are the highest bidder. Neulevel plans on randomly assigning them.

One you have to pay to even get in the game, and it is a game of chance. The other is free to enter, and is not random. That's how they're different.

Why is a lottery illegal? Well, they're pretty much illegal by default. It's a form of gambling, after all, and you need a gambling license. Or leave of the state(s) involved, which you're not going to get because they already have their little monopoly 'tax on people who are bad at math'.

Re:What's illegal about it?

[JabberWokky]

Wow, an amazing example of flawed logic and disconnected symbolic statements.

And the stock market is not gambling. 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. Why do you think the bank gives you free checking? The money that you have in the bank goes to a variety of investments, including stock portfolios (depending on how the market is doing, quite a bit of it).

--
Evan

T'was a scam anyway.....

[IcebergSlim]

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 .biz for our domain would be to put in more bids than anyone (if anyone) else competing for it......

What a scam......

Proposed Domain

[Lysander Luddite]

For NeuLevel

neulevel.outof.biz

Re:why was this suit pressed?

[sulli]

why was this suit pressed?

Wrinkles

The thing that bothers me

[trilucid]

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.

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"

Our experience

[kindbud]

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).

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 .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.

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 .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.

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. :)