Is digital archery bugged too?

ICANN’s digital archery system, which will be used to decide the fates of many new gTLD applicants, may have a bug, according to one applicant.

In a must-read post over on CircleID, Top Level Domain Holdings CEO Antony Van Couvering presents some intriguing evidence that ICANN’s system may be mis-recording timestamps.

Van Couvering hypothesizes that that when applicants’ clicks are recorded before their target time, the software records “the wrong seconds value, but with the right milliseconds value”.

He’s asked ICANN to look into the issue, and has added his voice to those clamoring for gTLD batching to be scrapped entirely.

With so many applicants using custom software to fire their arrows, millisecond differences will be hugely important.

However, as Van Couvering notes, ICANN does not plan to reveal applicants’ scores until July 11, so it’s impossible to tell if this alleged “bug” in the test suite is replicated in the live firing range.

The digital archery system uses the now-notoriously flawed TLD Application System.

JUNE 12 UPDATE:

In a follow-up post, Van Couvering reports, based on a conversation with ICANN, that the “bug” was indeed present, but that it was in the presentation layer, rather than the underlying database.

In other words, it was cosmetic and unlikely to influence the outcome of the batching process.

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Tagged: digital archery, ICANN, new gTLDs, tldh, top level domain holdings