Governing a Global Resource from Los Angeles County
By Bret A. Fausett
In October, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles County, California issued a preliminary injunction against NeuLevel, the domain name registry operator for the Internet's new .biz top-level domain. The injunction prohibited NeuLevel from allocating tens of thousands of .biz domain names to registrants around the world. The reason? The allocation scheme that NeuLevel adopted for deciding who got which .biz name violated provisions of the California penal code prohibiting private lotteries.
What NeuLevel proposed was pretty simple, really. To prevent its servers from collapsing under tens of thousands of simultaneous registration requests when it launched the new domain, NeuLevel would create a time window over weeks in which prospective registrants could submit applications for .biz domains. Registrants paid a $2 fee for each application. Every application received at any time during this period—which NeuLevel called the "landrush phase"—was given an equal chance at the domain. After the landrush phase, applications would be selected at random and the winning names assigned to the lucky applicants.
However, in California, and many other states, any procedure by which a person pays consideration for the opportunity to win a prize by chance is an illegal lottery. Of course there are exceptions for charitable raffles and state-run lotteries, but what NeuLevel proposed was neither. If what the plaintiffs alleged was true, this was a private plan to allocate domain names (the prize) at random (by chance) for a fee (consideration)—exactly what the California penal code prohibits.<>
