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The Internet Technology

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."
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ICANN To Replace 'Digital Archery' Program With Raffle

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  • The Canadian province of British Columbia does as well... And Quebec requires that anyone running a raffle or other game of chance not only register, but pay all provincial and federal taxes on the winnings.
    • I forget, but why does California law matter in this context? Is ICANN in California?
      • 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.
        • by Sulphur ( 1548251 ) on Friday October 12, 2012 @09:07PM (#41638429)

          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?

        • by PPH ( 736903 )

          Who cares? Its not as if there are any significant players in the Internet business in California anyway.

          </humor>

          Well, there won't be after all this dust settles.

        • "It is as illegal to take part in an unregistered raffle as it is to run one."

          And it's getting to the point of WTFC (who the f*ck cares?).

          The "digital archery" idea was so astoundingly bone-headed that I have a hard time believing these people are still running the organization.

          Let's build a DNS-free, decentralized internet, and fire these bureaucratic bozos.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I got out of the ISP business a decade ago. But it seems nothing has changed, they still richly deserve what we used to call them back then, ICANN't

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 12, 2012 @08:05PM (#41638051)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      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

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Context please!

  • Money grab (Score:5, Informative)

    by corychristison ( 951993 ) on Friday October 12, 2012 @08:10PM (#41638105)

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    These idiots have already given us sacks of cash for nothing in return. How much more can we scam off them?

  • What's wrong with doing them in the order they are recieved, like almost everyone else does for everything else?

    • Because they originally announced that the order would not matter, and people took their time to submit proposals. It is like changing rules in the middle of the game.

      • Like they've been doing since the beginning anyways? Just have everyone re-submit a new copy and use that order.
        • That is exactly what is being dubbed as digital archery. People did not like digital archery and now ICANN is offering a raffle.

          • "Hit a button at exactly 10:00am on December 5th" and "send in new copies now" are not exactly the same.
            • So who ever notices the email (or news) first gets to claim the domain? I would prefer a raffle to this, if I were one of the participants (hell, I would even prefer the digital archery to this).

  • by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Friday October 12, 2012 @08:14PM (#41638137)

    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.

    • by Ignacio ( 1465 )

      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.

  • Who the hell put these jokers in charge in the first place? They keep going from one bad idea to the next...

  • Is it just me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 12, 2012 @08:47PM (#41638315)
    or is there a metric tonne of crap that California's consumer protection laws save the rest of us from?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    This probably violates California cancer disclosure laws.

  • It is just selecting the order by lot.

    Lotteries and raffles are sweepstakes and are restricted. In a sweepstakes, you pay X amount of money but don't necessarily get X amount of product. The biggest restriction is that each person who enters must receive something of at least the value of what they paid. And since you don't want to pay everyone out, that effectively means the entry price must be $0 to satisfy this restriction.

    But in the iCANN system each of these companies "wins", they all receive what they

    • by makomk ( 752139 )

      ICANN charged a fairly substantial non-refundable entrance fee for each application and allowed multiple companies to apply for the same gTLD, but obviously only one company can get each one. They're now planning on picking which applicant actually receives something for the money they've paid at random. That's pretty clearly a raffle.

      • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        yeah while the obvious solution is that if there's two companies which have reasonable claims to a tld then neither of the companies should have it.

        in reality this project inside icann will not be finished until the guys running this shit show have another project to go to. until then it's stalling time!

  • I bought my raffle ticket? Where's my post?

  • There's no way a raffle can be rigged!
  • clicked all the article links and they all talk like everyone know what it means. Also google search only link to articles saying icann is not using whatever it is. probably the very same article that must have came here trhu reuters or some other.

    The only link that does not appear to be that same article is this one http://www.digitalarcheryexperts.com/ [digitalarc...xperts.com]
    but it appears to be the destination of clicks on those 'hit the monkey' banners from the 90s so i will not take it seriously.

  • Anyone want to create a GTLD blocker program?

    If enough angry people install it, it won't matter if gtld's exist..

  • ...that we really don't need ICANN when we have alternative democratic roots such as OpenNIC [opennicproject.org]? Those who complain about the money-grubbing ways of ICANN really shouldn't complain if they haven't checked out the alternatives.

    • 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.
      • by pongo000 ( 97357 )

        OpenNIC isn't a for-profit entity. Rather, it's an open-source, democratic altroot that isn't interested in making money on TLDs. BTW, OpenNIC has been around now for 12 years or so. Interesting that they outlasted NewDotNet...

    • The point of a domain name is it should resolve correctly from on any computer on the internet. A domain that most users can't resolve is pretty much worthless.

      • by pongo000 ( 97357 )

        The point of a domain name is it should resolve correctly from on any computer on the internet. A domain that most users can't resolve is pretty much worthless.

        Not unless people finally tire of the games ICANN plays and say enough is enough. BTW, any computer on the internet can resolve an OpenNIC TLD. It just needs a bit of configuration to do so. Of course, there will always be naysayers who say it's better to "stay the course," because we all know that alternatives are worthless.

        • by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          And in theory, any computer on the internet can display HTML pages correctly, yet there are still millions of MSIE users. Unless Microsoft installs it by default, there is very little chance of success.

          Also; what's to stop OpenNIC from being abused by evil companies? Who decide who gets which domain(s)? How will people vet the billions of domains ranging from a.free to zzzzzzzzzzzzz.free that evil companies are destined to automatically submit every day?

          • by pongo000 ( 97357 )

            And in theory, any computer on the internet can display HTML pages correctly, yet there are still millions of MSIE users. Unless Microsoft installs it by default, there is very little chance of success.

            And the success rate for returning a sample from Mars? 0%...guess that means NASA should give up on ever getting a sample from Mars?

            Also; what's to stop OpenNIC from being abused by evil companies? Who decide who gets which domain(s)? How will people vet the billions of domains ranging from a.free to zzzzzzzz

            • by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

              Realistic != naysayer.
              Idealism is fine amongst idealists, but doesn't always work out in the real world.
              Open source is protected by legal frameworks such as the GPL. What legal framework protects OpenNIC?
              Evil companies may take over Linux development completely, yet they could still be forced to keep source open by a single copyright holder. What is to stop OpenNIC from being taken over by corporate drones?

  • They could just arrange a deathmatch game of Q3 arena, with all the applicants for a gTLD allowed to choose one entrant who MUST have been a company employee for at least a year, and the first to twenty frags gets it...

    • Would this be a knock-out tournament setup or have all 10,000 of them in one huge arena? Because I would PAY to see the later broadcast to the public!
  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Saturday October 13, 2012 @12:59AM (#41639375)

    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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 requirem

  • Am I the only one who misread the title at first as: ICANN To Replace 'Digital Archery' Program With Rifle ?
  • 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 ba

    • I'm guessing you live in the US where local businesses have pretty much take over .com ( you were SUPPOSED to use .us! ). Try going to Europe or Asia and then you will see that .com is MUCH more prevalent in North America than the rest of the world.
      • I do not live in the US and I own a number of .coms --- none of which have any relationship to business: which goes for most .coms.

        Ideally there would be no tlds; since they are not a physical requirement for urls which mask numbers: http:/// [http] or http://www./ [www.] or ftp:// [ftp] etc are more than enough to indicate an address.

  • by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Saturday October 13, 2012 @03:18AM (#41639865) Homepage

    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.

    • by jdogalt ( 961241 )

      ... 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.

      Umm... please do explain said gap. I'd like to save money on a few that I've 'parked', though without any ads, and not in any way to scam other companies.

  • Just process the damn applications in order of submission already.

    If that doesn't work, randomize it and be done with it.

    This is turning into a farce because you are dilly dallying WHILE YOU ALREADY HAVE THEIR MONEY.

    If I was one of the applicants I would be suing you for fraud by now.

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