ICANN To Replace 'Digital Archery' Program With Raffle 84
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."
Money grab (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] .
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:Is it just me (Score:0, Informative)
Nitpick on your signature. They are usually called extensions or addons (plugins in FF are usually very different).
Re:Why not do it randomly (Score:3, Informative)
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.