How to take down the Internet from the inside

Breaking news: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is holding a domain name raffle. Can an IP address bake sale be far behind?

ICANN opened up an enormous can of worms a few years back when it decided the world desperately needed more top-level domains, despite the fact that most of the 22 TLDs and 248 country-code top-level domains now available go largely unused. More than half of all URLs still end in .com, and another 25 percent use a ccTLD like .us or .cn. Newer domains like .aero, .museum, or .travel don’t even register on the surveys.

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But no matter. In true Oprah “everybody gets a car” fashion, ICANN decided that anybody who wants to start up a new top-level domain can have one, provided a) they fork over $185,000 per domain as an application fee, and b) ICANN gets to play final arbiter as to who gets to own which domain.

The process has been bungled at virtually every opportunity, and the buffoonery shows no sign of abating. Imagine if your local DMV was staffed by the cast from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” That’s ICANN. If it were a limo, it would be a clown car. If it were a cookie, it would be Nutter Butter.

ICANN received nearly 2,000 requests from 1,100 companies that wanted their own corner of the InterWebs, generating more than $350 million in fees. Now that’s a tidy little business model. Coincidentally, ICANN’s board of directors is made up largely of domain registrars, who stand to profit quite handsomely from the cover-your-assets land rush that will happen when deep-pocketed companies like Disney and Apple buy up all that new Internet real estate to protect their brands.

But this rush of popularity brought a new problem for ICANN, since it now had to comb through every application to determine if a domain met its standards (whatever they are) and which of the competing parties got to own the most popular ones. For example, both Google and Amazon want to own .cloud, and 11 domain registrars are vying over who has the right to sell domains ending in .inc. Who gets to decide? You guessed it: ICANN.

After the dust had settled (and the checks had cleared), ICANN suddenly realized it couldn’t actually process 2,000 applications in a timely fashion. So last June it set up a “digital archery” contest to determine which applications would be considered first.

No, it wasn’t one of those spammy banner ads that ask you to shoot a flying duck with your mouse to enter a drawing for an iPad. That might have actually made some sense. In ICANN’s scheme, applicants had to name a day and time they wanted their application to be considered, then log into ICANN’s system at exactly that moment. The difference between the time they asked for and the time they logged in would determine when their applications got processed. The first 500 to come closest to their target would be processed first, then the next 500, and so on.

No, seriously, I’m not making that up.

But each application review period lasts five or six months. So if you were the unlucky duck who wanted to own, say, .duck and your digital arrow flew a few milliseconds more slowly than everyone else’s, ICANN wouldn’t have been able to tell you whether your nonrefundable $185,000 gamble paid off until some time in 2014.

Or perhaps as one of the 13 companies longing to own the .app domain, you hit the bull’s-eye and landed in the first batch. But three of those other .app wannabes failed to release the bow in time and had to wait for the last round. You, too, would have to wait until 2014 to find out if you’d won.

ICANN ultimately abandoned that plan. That contest failed not merely because it was a completely asinine idea, but also because ICANN failed to account for things like network lag. Apparently, the folks at ICANN don’t really understand how this whole Webbernets thing operates. Hey, they can’t be experts on everything.

In July, ICANN announced it would handle all 1,930 applications simultaneously. That new plan lasted less than three months. Last week, it announced a raffle: For only $100, hopeful TLD owners can buy a ticket for a drawing; the order in which applications are considered would then be chosen randomly.

But as a California nonprofit corporation, ICANN isn’t allowed to conduct lotteries. So it’s hoping to rely on a loophole in the law by classifying the drawing as a “fundraiser.” The kicker there is you can only buy these tickets in person — so the many international firms vying for domains would have to send someone to California to buy the tickets or hire a proxy to do it for them. Of course, this still doesn’t solve the problem of the 13 companies that want to own .app or the 11 who want .inc of being considered at different times.

You get what I’m saying? A roomful of monkeys could come up with a better solution to solve this mostly nonexistent problem.

I have a better idea: Use a real dartboard. Tack all the uncontested domain requests to the wall and hire an orangutan to fling darts at them. The 10 or 20 it comes closest to are the winners.

As for the contested domains? Just have these wannabe domain owners send their toughest guys into the woods together. Whoever walks out gets to own the TLD.

These plans are no more or less ridiculous than anything ICANN has proposed so far. But they’d be a damn site quicker and, in the long run, probably more fair.

Is ICANN totally whacked or what? Offer your clinical diagnoses below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “How to take down the Internet from the inside,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.