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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."
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.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
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.
or is there a metric tonne of crap that California's consumer protection laws save the rest of us from?
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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?
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.