Applicants can buy their tickets for ICANN’s gTLD ‘prioritisation draw’ until 19.00 GMT on December 17, two hours before the raffle begins.
The $100 tickets can be bought in person from the Hilton hotel, Los Angeles airport, where the draw will take place, or through a third-party proxy at no extra cost. ICANN “strongly” recommends that applicants buy tickets before December 17, it said on its website.
The draw will decide the order in which ICANN begins delegating evaluated applications onto the Internet in April 2013. It will start at 21.00 GMT and is expected to last six hours.
ICANN has already stated that applications for internationalised domain names—those in non-Latin alphabets—will be drawn first. These 116 applications will be drawn separately, before the remaining ones (about 1,800).
Applicants do not have to buy a ticket, but it is believed many brands will take part because they want to rank as highly as possible to gain a first-mover advantage in the market.
ICANN will publish the results of the draw within 24 hours of it finishing.
This article was first published on 13 December 2012 in World IP Review
gtld, icann, la hilton, raffle
