ICANN To Replace 'Digital Archery' Program With Raffle

itwbennett writes "As Slashdot readers will recall, ICANN has been struggling to find a way to decide which applications to evaluate first. At the end of June, ICANN announced it had abandoned plans to use the Digital Archery contest. Then at the end of July, ICANN said it would process all applications simultaneously. Now there's a new plan in the works: an old-fashioned, manual raffle with tickets costing $100. There's just one catch, though: California law prohibits unlicensed lotteries."

Comments

fucking worthless.

[nimbius]

ICANN serves no point but to make a few old white guys filthy rich these days. call me an old fart but i think .info proved good and goddamned well we dont need anymore TLD's. .org is already abused enough as it is, and unless ICANN wants to chew through those shit sandwiches first i dont think they should be allowed to do any archery, or raffles, or whatever charades they feel are appropriate in the means of keeping up appearances while they whore out the internet.

Re:fucking worthless.

[Mitreya]

call me an old fart but i think .info proved good and goddamned well we dont need anymore TLD's.

Also, no one uses domain names as envisioned earlier. If the last website I found through [google or other search engine] had an .info domain, I didn't even notice. How much traffic do mis-typed domain owners get nowdays?
It's bookmarks or search engine to find any domain now

Money grab

[corychristison]

This whole thing from day one has been about one thing and one thing only: money.

I didn't like this gTLD crap when they first announced it and I think this just confirms how bad of a joke this whole thing is.

If this raffle idea goes through I urge everyone to just ignore it. ICANN needs to get their head out of their ass.

Applications for gTLDs

[sexconker]

TFS doesn't say what this shit is for. It's for applications for new gTLDs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain .

Basically, a bunch of clowns at major corporations want to register their own version of .com, .net, etc.. ICANN said "no that's dumb" for a long time, but someone told them they could make money off of it, so they decided to go for it, but they didn't have any plan on how to handle applications. ICANN as usual fucked it up.

Now there's probably a hundred applications for .abc and ICANN can't figure out which one to evaluate first.

Re:Applications for gTLDs

[Ignacio]

TFS doesn't say what this shit is for.

That's because it's been in TFS of almost every article mentioning ICANN for the past... year and a half or so. Maybe longer.

Re:Not only California...

[BabaChazz]

Basically it seems that this would bar any company in California (and much of Canada) from entering this raffle. It is as illegal to take part in an unregistered raffle as it is to run one.

Is it just me

[rsilvergun]

or is there a metric tonne of crap that California's consumer protection laws save the rest of us from?

Re:Not only California...

[Sulphur]

Basically it seems that this would bar any company in California (and much of Canada) from entering this raffle. It is as illegal to take part in an unregistered raffle as it is to run one.

In other words ICANNt?

Re:When will people figure out...

[NJRoadfan]

A company called NewDotNet tried this about 10 years ago. It installed adware to resolve the then non-existent TLDs they kept a registry for.

Why not do it randomly

[jonwil]

Have a computer program with a good solid Random Number Generator pick the order in which new TLDs get evaluated.
No-one can complain because its random and everyone has an equal chance of getting their TLDs evaluated first.

Re:Why not do it randomly

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the problem is that they don't want to refund the application fee if they can't actually provide the TLD. Since multiple companies want the same TLDs, and only one can have it, that means that regardless of what method they choose, multiple people paid but only one gets the prize. Thus they need to find some way to get around anti-gambling laws.

Essentially what this is all about is that they already blew the application fees on drugs and so they have to figure out some way to avoid any requirement to issue a refund. The "we can only process so many applications a year" nonsense is just a distraction. Regardless of how fast they can process applications, there's still the problem of deciding who gets something for their money and who doesn't. This is also why they can't take the simple route of processing the applications in the order they were received. In that case, rather than running a lottery, they merely accepted payment for something they couldn't deliver on. Thus that doesn't solve their problem either.

Honestly, if I were them, and I had no morals (like I said, if I was them) then I'd just make up some excuse to reject all but one application for each TLD. In that way, I'd get to keep the application fee because I did perform the service of evaluating the application, thus no anti-gambling laws were violated.

TLDs are pointless

[v. Konigsmann]

Get rid of all of them except .com. Just don't issue any others, and leave the ones already there until attrition destroys them.

There's no actual value to having different tlds for the website xxxxxx, other than to make money for domain sellers, who frighten the owner ( renter ) of xxxxxx.com into buying more domains for the same site to stop competitors from using xxxxxx.net or xxxxxx.org. I have never come across a real site whose domain name led to an entirely unrelated site run by different owners based on the .yyy.

Should one imagine this would lead to not enough site names, there are enough words to be combined in any language and enough languages to accommodate millions of sites. Plus losing the fake/crap sites ---scraper-sites for just one instance --- would not harm the internet at all.

Here's another alternative...

[mwvdlee]

Stop the new TLD mess, it's just a money grab. Only introduce new TLD's if there's a clear need for it. .biz and .info have pretty much failed as well (mostly scam sites), how much better will all those hundreds of new TLD's fare?
Instead focus on releasing those millions of parked domainnames or atleast fix the administrative gap that allows registrars to keep those millions of domains parked for practically free. The problem isn't a lack of TLD's, it's a lack of decent domainnames and most of those are wasted on yet another money grabbing scheme.