New Domains Delayed, Open to Corps. First 84
PacketMaster writes: "This story on Reuters outlines some of the problems besetting the awardees of the new TLD contracts. The article highlighted three main areas of concern - some registrars having financial problems, the inexperience of ICANN's staff at getting the contracts done and (of main concern to most people) that some registrars will give trademark holders first shot at registering domains. Appearantly at least one registrar, RegistryPro (.pro) will be "..allowing individuals and companies that own a particular trademark to have first crack at signing up the corresponding domain name." The article also quotes Afilias (.info) as saying they'll be open in May. Not a very technical article, but good for an overview of the path the TLDs are treading."
Namespace collisions? (Score:4)
ICANN's future (Score:1)
It's only a matter of time before the furor over ICANN's crap, and the current congressional interest, turns their house upside down. Every self-serving decesion they've made, especially keeping the new, at-large, members outside, is likely to be found invalid eventually.
1Alpha7
Fair enough. (Score:3)
In the case where two or more trademark holders want the same names, we'll be back to the same old first-come first-serve solutions, and when that doesn't work, they'll sue each other again. Besides, I'm willing to bet that many of the same companies will buy the same domains anyhow, as insurance.
Remember how quickly companies snapped up the same '888' numbers, when those came out? Guess who gets 'ibm.pro'...
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:1)
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:5)
Domain rights? (Score:2)
I, as a representative of Acme Corp. am contacted by RegistryPro, asking if I would like to register AcmeCorp.pro. I politely decline the offer, and go about my merry way dealing with AcmeCorp.com as I always have done.
Shortly thereafter, a cybersquatter registers AcmeCorp.pro. I never see it, because I'm working with AcmeCorp.com.
Some Big Cheese at Acme Corp. finds out that someone has stolen AcmeCorp.pro from us! Acme Corp. then decides that they want the domain name.
- Insert long legal battle here
What happens then??? I think we've all seen this played out in other forms.
URL mania to die? (Score:1)
ok, I hate cybersquating... (Score:1)
If this is going to be the case, what is the use to have new TLDs if the same people that own the actual domains for their brand can have the new TLDs too ??
More competition (Score:2)
Now we are where we are, and there's likely no way back. What could one live with it--in a reasonable way?
Having different companies register names under the same domain has proven to be inefficient: they blame each other, and the actual maintainer is still privileged.
A reasonable idea is to give different TLDs to different registrars, making the DNS root managed by a non-profit.
And look--surprise-- this is what evil ICANN is doing. Maybe it's time for us to give them time to do it right?
Better than the old system (Score:3)
Take, for example, me.
My nick has been BrianVan since about 1992. Lo and behold, within the last few years, someone registered brianvan.com [brianvan.com] before I could find a decent reason to grab it myself.
Go, I dare you to take a look. (nothing involving goats, sex, or anuses) I had better web design skills than that in sophomore year of high school.
It's slander, I tell ya.
Back to the point, any system that's different than the one that allowed THAT travesty to take place.
By the way, I tried to bribe the guy into giving me the domain name, but I got no response. I'll have to settle for brianvan.net instead...
wait, my bad, the site is different (Score:1)
Trust me it's a lot better than what used to be there.
Re:Makes Sense (Score:1)
--
Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.-- Cool Hand Luke
I guess it makes sense (Score:1)
One thing is for sure, I wouldn't be caught dead with a ".pro" or ".info" domain. Imagine the horrible jokes: "What's wrong buddy, not man enough for a
Sometimes people can be just plain mean.
What about legitimate non-corporate interests? (Score:4)
As long as the semantics of domain names are ignored (a for-profit company should not have rights to
Re:Fair enough. (Score:1)
Who needs ICANN? (Score:1)
more money from the prez (Score:3)
This simply means that the "commander-in-thief" will be handing out our 1.6 trillion dollars to protect himself from a bruised ego with more sites like:
Perhaps I'll go out and get domains like: bush-has-no.info, bush-is-a-wannabe.pro, etc.
Re:Better than the old system (Score:1)
I looked at the site and I am guessing that the owner's name might really be "Brian Van". (Assuming that Van is a Vietnamese name.)
How is it that he's not more entitled to the domain than you?
You could have grabbed it, but you didn't. It's not like it's being held by a squatter or a clearing house - Be happy with your dot net.
Cheers,
Jim, who didn't get his dot com, either.
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:1)
Mike van Lammeren
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:1)
---
Let's take a look at a new system (Score:2)
--
Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead?? (Score:4)
The current TLD's suck in my opinion.
Want I would like to see is a .music
domain that only trademarked musical artists/groups could apply for.
AFAIK, musical group names are unique for each country and "trademark only" means no cybersquatting problems.
Why do I even mention this?
Well think of some of the potential:
Eliminate the middle man for artists big and small in selling cd's i.e. **** off Big Recording Labels and your crazy profits/cd
Musicians establishing a company to handle the distribution of all cd's sold on .music domains. (funded by a tiny fraction of all .music sales??) Further eliminates any influence of themiddle man.
Napster could link to .music sites ONLY
ALL trademarked musical groups could be provided with a default .music web site to sell
their music. The bigger bands would obviously
design their own.
So why is this good?
Well for music buying people like myself, it means anytime I wanted to purchase a cd from my favourite group, say bandX, I simply go to www.bandX.music and I know that it will be there.
I also know that pretty much all my money is going to the artist and NOT to some f***** up large corporation.
Since the vast percentage of music lovers are able to buy over the net it could made successful simply by market force.
Just a few advantages for us music buyers:
convenience
cheaper cd's (current_price -big_company_percentages = cheaper_cd)
more confidence in online purchase (may increase e-commerce confidence in general)
Im sure there's a bootload of beauracracy and ego's to be destroyed for this to happen but if the artists really wanted it (huge profit/cd increase in their pocket could help here) it couldnt fail right?
Nice racket (Score:2)
check for their shareholders. Nice racket, who do I bribe at ICANN it get in on this.
Re:Better than the old system (Score:2)
But that raises a good point... how do we distribute personal domain names fairly? How come corporations can get domain names (or fight over them for a prolonged time) quite easily, while individuals don't have a TLD and have to hope that some towing company or obsolete software company doesn't have the same name?
Yea, a personal TLD would be a mess as well, but it's a way of resolving SOME namespace conflicts...
just say no (Score:1)
Re:Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead?? (Score:1)
Doesn't a search engine, such as Google [google.com], serve the same purpose?  And how many independent artist really trademark their band name?
Re:ok, I hate cybersquating... (Score:2)
Re:Fair enough. (Score:1)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
youcann.org (Score:2)
Let's make all this irrelevant
politics... (Score:1)
tics: blood sucking insects
Why on earth do fscking internet domain names have to become a political fight? jesus christ! How hard is it to muck with the global nameserver caches?? ARGH
New TLDS without ICANN (Score:2)
Re:More competition (Score:2)
why wouldn't they want to do the same in cyberspace. what good reason would you have for using the name in a domain unless you were trying to take advantage of the work they did. and I'll accept arguments from all the joe and joanne macdonalds out there and all the mr and mrs international business machines and joe pepsi the actor
but everyone else.. i don't think so.
but even i agree that macdonalds don't need macdonalds.pro or aero or non business related names and they should be available to other users.
I think if the use by another doesn't constitute holding out ie acting like the hamburger macdonalds, and there is little chance of users getting mixed up then they shouldn't just get it as of right.
The rego bodies have to make tough decisions like that. Thats why they get paid. not just to take names and cash cheques.
Re:Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead?? (Score:1)
The power of a .music domain is that you *know* where to buy the cd without having to search for it.
You want to limp bizkit? Goto www.limpbizkit.music
You want powderfinger (my favourite australian band)? Goto www.powderfinger.music.au
You get the idea.
Well, every indep. artist planning on being succesfull sure as hell does. Nothing better than reaching a wide audience then discovering someone else has your name (e.g. Blink 182).
And thats the idea anyhow - to stop dodgy people claiming .music domain names. If an up and coming indep. artist knew that no trademark name meant no .music sales then you can bet that they'll do something about it. They might even discover that
"pearl jam" has already been used b4 its too late :\
Re:Nice racket (Score:1)
Re:Makes Sense (Score:1)
Re:URL mania to die? (Score:1)
Re:Domain rights? (Score:2)
better solutions already exist (Score:2)
- the OpenNIC [unrated.net]
- ORSC
- PacRoot
and so on.New.net arrives on the scene with venture funding and ignores pre-existing claims. They can expect no support from the alternative namespace communities.
Claim your namespace.
I agree completely... (Score:1)
If you don't like ICANN, solutions exist. Vote with your resolver.
Claim your namespace.
Re:What about legitimate non-corporate interests? (Score:3)
On the other hand, if the owner of 'foo.com' is clearly exploiting someone else's 'foo' trademark, I doubt you'll find much sympathy even here. Trademark law is in theory a good idea -- it protects consumers from confusion and makes sure that what you're buying is actually the product you think it is. If someone is violating that, then sure, they should be stopped. But that doesn't mean "cyber squatting" applies when there is no legit chance of confusion.
--
If the trademark owners want it that way... (Score:2)
Domain name carpet bombing (Score:4)
Some unfortunate soul peddling a computer game about a corps of BASE jumping ninjas (called BASECorp) manages to get basecorp.game. When BaseCorp finds out, they set their lawyers on them since BaseCorp has a games division. Unfortunate Soul is labelled a domain squatter and loses the domain.
By the end of the year, each large company owns a raft of domains under a pile of TLDs and we have run out of domains again. There's a boom in domain name disputes.
Yeah yeah, it's all been thought out and it's not going to happen. But I have faith in the persistance of lawyers. Try registering anyhting matching *sun*.com http://www.sunrk.com.au/srk_legal.html [sunrk.com.au]
Xix.
Re:What about legitimate non-corporate interests? (Score:3)
There's a power struggle. When everything is wild, the masses have a certain power in numbers. But the corporations have great monetary resources, if not creativity, and they manipulate the system too. Moving to law (like trademarks) certainly gives them an advantage, because they can be more effective thugs. But thugs exist in a wild system too. They don't exist in a just system, and that's what we haven't quite achieved (though, heck, it could be a lot worse).
Am I the only one.. (Score:1)
Where is it from?
Trademark holders from where? (Score:1)
Can you say disaster waiting to happen?
GOATSE.CX IN THAT LINK DON'T CLICK IT!! (Score:1)
Dumb question, but.. (Score:3)
No, I don't mean a country selling its national domain to any and all comers. I mean, what happens if a country sets up its root servers to resolve both
Concrete example: Turkey decides to start selling
Re:Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead?? (Score:2)
www.powderfinger.music.au
the TLD is .AU
the domain is Music
under this example you would need to buy a .AU address for each of you TLD for this to work. example- lets say you wanted ford.cars.au you could start .cars on your own but you would need to buy cars.au to make it fit in like the curent system
________
Real Fix for Trademarked Domains (Score:4)
mark.category.country.tmk
Using my trademark as an example, that would be "curbside-recording.ent.us.tmk". Why? Because each country has their own trademarks and each trademark office assigns trademarks to different industry groups that don't compete with each other. The registration authority would be the trademark authority for the country. Anything else will be lawsuit bait.
I guess US trademarks only need apply (Score:1)
DNS rant. (Score:1)
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/dns/
(again)
Re:Dumb question, but.. (Score:2)
Re:Better than the old system (Score:1)
Re:Am I the only one.. (Score:1)
Re:Am I the only one.. (Score:1)
I see it about 6 times a day now with no sign of slowdown.
Somebody set the system clock ahead 15 minutes.
Re:ICANN's future (Score:1)
*Rinse*, *Repeat*
Re:If the trademark owners want it that way... (Score:2)
So except for ".info" and ".biz", which are completely general purpose, I expect that several of the new TLDs will have rules in place to prevent trademark owners from controlling everything (at least beyond whatever the courts may impose on them).
To see what the new TLDs will be doing, go to ICANNs website [icann.org], and look for the contract appendices that are being posted - ICANN have started posting the contract appendices for the suggested contracts with the new TLDs. Not everything is there yet, as they are being added after ICANN feels the documents in question have reached an acceptable state.
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:1)
What more do you want from them?
Re:Domain rights? (Score:1)
DISCLAIMER: I'm employed by Melbourne IT, so you can add as much of a bag of salt to this as you want.
Re:ok, I hate cybersquating... (Score:1)
Because the new TLDs (well, some of them at least), unlike the current gTLDs, aren't at this stage a complete free-for-all.
DISCLAIMER: I work for Melbourne IT, take this comment with as much salt as you see fit, and I have a pepper shaker here too if you really want it...
My thoughts... (Score:2)
I hate this cybersquatting perhaps more than everyone else here.
Once, I stumbled accidently about this URL:
http://www.wildapache.net/
I don't know about this organization, looks like it would belong to native americans (Apache), probably they could have the right to get the apache.org domain, but it doesn't look as they would like, instead they have this nice icon on their first page, telling you that it's powered by the apache www server.
I thought, wow these are really tuff guys...:-)
Michael
A Piece of Advice So You Don't get Swindled (Score:1)
Why? I'll give you a quick run-down:
- there's no guarantee that the domains will ever become reality
- even if these new tld's make it out, the particular registrar will probably be competing with countless others in what they call round-robin style of handing out domains. Basically, it means if there are 10 registrars, ICANN will let them take turns. You pre-registered sex.xxx, but someone else ahead of you might take it before you. So if there are 50 other competitors, your chance will be 1/50, if even that!
- how do you know the registrar won't be "cheating" to get sex.xxx in front of you? If they do how would you be able to prove it? And trust me, nobody's gonna be giving you a bar of gold if they can get it for free, without your knowledge.
But I may be wrong. I think many of them have already been chosen to administer a particular tld. But whatever the case, just say NO to PRE-registering, at all costs.
I should know... I got swindled out of sex.web back in 1997!!!! And that crap hasn't even come out yet after all these years!!
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
Re:Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead?? (Score:3)
Two problems with this. One -- the boatload of beauracracy to manage publishing rights (ASCAP, etc) still exists and can't be undone.
Two: the reason ASCAP exists in the first place is addressed by your suggestion I quoted. As Sting said in the trial of his ex- accountant (who embezzeled millions out of String, among others), "I read music, not figures".
Musicians don't want to be in business, as much as they may want to be in the business (not the same thing). They would find it far easier to attach themselves to another already existing company than set up their own (they just want to get on with playing music), and once that's done, you've got a beauracratic conglomerate, representing the goals of multiple artists, often without their direct input. You replace the labels with something worse: a second mega-"representative" like ASCAP. MP3.com had the potential to be that mega-rep, and that's why they were a threat (and remain one) to the RIAA. By making mp3.com pay (through the nose) for the distribution rights over the my.mp3.com service, the RIAA keeps mp3.com from making enough money to make this non-record-label-distribution scheme work.
Re:Domain rights? - cart before the horse (Score:1)
Re:Domain rights? (Score:1)
We need a .par TLD (Score:2)
But LNUX or RHAT would be my prime choices. Once they have a monopoly on the domain of parody, they can open registration up to corporations and trademark holders exclusively for the first six weeks.
But wait.. there's more
They can charge 3 million per name (or some reasonable percentage of the value of the trademark - according to what the corporate shysters and beancounters have been claiming in publicly available documents. Let the humour impaired pay for their disability
After six weeks they can open the domain up to everyone on a first come first served basis for 20 bucks a pop - or just award em to the goat guy. (link not included on purpose) If one of the Liinux companies gets it, they have a nice bit of extra income and might just stop the trolls for the folks obsessed with their current share prices.
This should come as no surprise (Score:2)
The entire exercise in TLDs is a farce and is rapidly beginning to resemble a money-generating scheme for the registrars and ICANN. "Existing TLD business slow? Make new TLDS! Profit from registration frenzy!"
The only way to prevent corporate entities from hogging the namespaces is to have strict government regulations that would restrict TLDs to their chartered purpose, with the emphasis on enforcement at the registrar level -- these are the people with a profit motive to bend the rules. Strict regulation of multi-name ownership would help too, so that companies don't register thousands of names that get registered to "protect" trademarks but never get used.
And EVEN THAT is dubious, since it would require at minimum a major agreement among G7 governments to enforce. And even then it's doubtful that such a transnational agreement would work or get finalized in my lifetime.
The real answer is to scrap TLDs. Their intended purposes are unenforceable and their meaning is so diluted as to be meaningless. They're not necessary or useful unless some real, enforceable rules are in place.
Re:This should come as no surprise (Score:1)
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:1)
.info, Controlled by Tucows? (Score:1)
Re:Better than the old system (Score:1)
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:2)
Re:More competition (Score:1)
Re:.info, Controlled by Tucows? (Score:1)
http://www.afilias.com
There's an explanation here (Score:1)
Enjoy
Re:Namespace collisions? (Score:1)
Just to piss her off, I think I will have my name changed to Celine Dion amd register all of these new TLD's.
Better yet, I'll change my name to Celine Online, and make ICANN force her to give me www.celineonline.com. :)
Re:Better than the old system (Score:2)
Re:We need a .par TLD (Score:2)
Re:What about legitimate non-corporate interests? (Score:1)
In case you haven't noticed, it's no longer 1992.
Why is only commercial speech protected? (Score:1)
I don't see any reason why big companies should get any preference when it comes to registering domain names. Domain names should be registered on a first-come-first served basis.
Galactic Geek
Re:Real Fix for Trademarked Domains (Score:1)
Galactic Geeks
That's not what the Miami Herald said (Score:2)
Check your facts. The report you're most likely referring to was on an individual county - the entire state
Of course, their article has been taken down (from only 3 days ago), and replaced with one of Jeb standing tall about to make his "state of the state" address.
So I grabbed the cached page from Google, and it says that Al Gore won by a "slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537."
for some reason, slashdot won't render this link either - it's as though this report was meant to be buried... I'll just paste the text in below, and it will be archived in slashdot forever... http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.herald.co m/content/archive/news/elect2000/decision/104268.h tm
The reason that frat-head is in office is because the good-old boy network [lumpen.com] got involved along every step of the way - including the supreme court.
Re:That's not what the Miami Herald said (Score:2)
IF THE VOTE WERE FLAWLESS...
Gore would have had the edge in glitch-free Florida balloting, based on a Herald analysis
BY ANABELLE de GALE, LILA ARZUA AND CURTIS MORGAN
cmorgan@herald.com
SEE ALSO
Examining Florida's discarded ballots
How the study was done
If no one had ever heard of hanging chads, if the butterfly ballot had never flown, if no voter had bungled in the booth, who would have won Florida and the presidency of the United States?
In a race so tight, it may never be known for certain. But a Herald-commissioned analysis of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537.
It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword ''the will of the people.''
It is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes.
Reaction to the analysis, from the two camps locked in an exhausting and tense legal battle, was radically different. The Gore campaign called it ''compelling evidence,'' and the Bush campaign dismissed it as ''statistical voodoo.''
One fundamental flaw, Republicans argued, was an assumption that every voter actually intended to cast a vote in the presidential race. A large majority of ballots in the disputed counties of Palm Beach and Duval didn't even have a dimple on them, said Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew.
''If you want to divine voters' intent when there isn't even a mark on the ballot, you'd do better to hire a palm reader than a statistical analyst,'' he said.
But Stephen Doig, a professor at Arizona State University who crunched the numbers for The Herald, defended the analysis.
For example, he said, even if the analysis were adjusted to include the remote possibility that 90 percent of voters whose ballots were discarded actually intended to skip the race, the margin still would make a decisive difference for Gore -- about 1,400 votes.
Doig described it as a matter of analyzing extremes. He started his analysis with the assumption that every one of the 185,000 discarded ballots represented an intent to vote in the presidential race. The other extreme, he said, is the Bush contention that none of them should count.
''That extreme is the reality that we have, that Gov. Bush won by a razor-thin 500 votes,'' Doig said. ''I'm no psychic. I don't know what they really intended to do, but I do know that almost anywhere in that margin, Gore wins. You can argue about where in the range it should be.''
Political analysts were mixed on what the numbers mean.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies, said he considered the analysis open to questions.
''That is a reasonable assumption for the purposes of analysis,'' he said. ''For the purposes of politics, it's highly questionable. In most precincts, that may well be true, but in some precincts it may not be, and that's a critical difference.''
Still, Sabato said he found the end result ''perfectly reasonable.''
''What you're providing evidence for, however speculative, is that more people showed up on election day for Al Gore,'' he said. ''But I'd also state that in our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter. Only legal votes matter.''
And all statistical and anecdotal evidence he'd seen, he said, indicated that Bush probably collected more of those -- the ones that counted.
Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said there were too many variables in the analysis ''to feel comfortable.''
''Inferring what the voters' intent was, I have a real problem with people who can say they can do that,'' she said.
No one, of course, can accurately assess what 185,000 voters intended to do with their discarded ballots, but in purely statistical terms, there are consistent trends.
The Herald determined those trends by examining precinct results from each of the state's 67 counties. Those results showed that statewide, at least 185,000 ballots were discarded, either as undervotes (ballots that for whatever reason didn't record a vote for president) or overvotes (ballots where more than one candidate was selected).
Those ballots then were assigned to a candidate in the same proportion as the candidate had received in each precinct as a whole. Under that analysis, Bush would have received about 78,000, or 42 percent, of the uncounted votes, and Gore would have received more than 103,000, or 56 percent. The remaining 4,000 or so would have gone to the minor candidates.
That assumption of voting patterns is based on a concept long accepted by pollsters -- that the opinions of a small percentage of people can be extrapolated to project the views of a larger group. In this case, however, the projection uses a larger group, generally from 90 to 98 percent of the successful votes in precincts, to project the intent of a few.
The result: Gore ahead by 23,000 votes, a comfortable lead in comparison to the official statistical tossup, though still narrow enough to trigger the state's automatic recount, which kicks in when elections finish closer than one-half of one percent.
The analysis also confirmed that the voters in Democratic precincts had a far greater chance of having their ballots rejected. Only one of every 40 ballots was rejected in precincts Bush won, while one of every 27 ballots was rejected in precincts Gore won.
In addition, Doig, a former Herald research editor who now holds the Knight chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism specializing in computer-assisted reporting, found a number of other interesting trends:
* Voting machinery played a large role in rejections.
Of the 51 precincts in which more than 20 percent of ballots were rejected, 45 of them used punch cards -- 88 percent. Of the 336 precincts in which more than 10 percent were tossed out, 277 used punch cards -- 78 percent.
The overall rejection rate for the 43 counties using optical systems was 1.4 percent. The overall rejection rate for the 24 punch-card counties was 3.9 percent. That means that voters in punch-card counties, which included urban Democratic strongholds such as Broward and Palm Beach counties, were nearly three times as likely to have their ballots rejected as those in optical counties.
* In dozens of Florida precincts, at least one out of every four ballots were discarded as having no vote or too many votes for president.
* Nearly half of Gore's margin, more than 11,000 extra votes, would come from Palm Beach County alone. The other counties that would give him more than 1,000 new votes are Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval and Pinellas. Of those, Bush carried only Duval in the official tabulation.
* Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and Duval, where candidates' names were spread across two pages, had 31 percent of the uncounted ballots, but only 12 percent of the total votes cast.
* Only 11 percent of precincts statewide recorded no discarded ballots.
* Only one county would actually switch preferences for president -- tiny Madison, which officially went to Bush, but would have gone to Gore under The Herald's projections. More than 10 percent of Madison's 4,000-plus ballots were rejected.
QUESTION OF FAIRNESS
The analysis provides some evidence to bolster the Bush camp's claim that recounting some counties but not others is unfair to the Texas governor. For example, the analysis shows that if discarded ballots were to be reconsidered in Collier County, which Bush won, Bush might pick up about 1,000 net votes. Bush might also gain about 600 net votes in Lee County and about 500 net votes in Nassau County.
In all, the analysis shows Bush gaining in 43 counties. But many of those counties are rural and have relatively low numbers of votes, and the gains would be quickly eclipsed by the numbers Gore might pick up in the 23 mostly urban counties where the analysis shows he would show a net gain.
In only one county does the analysis show that neither candidate would gain on his rival. That is Volusia County, where the ballots already have undergone a controversial manual recount.
REFLECTION OF VOTE
Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for the vice president's campaign, said the results bolstered Gore's contention that the official results did not fairly and accurately reflect the vote.
''The outcome of the presidential election rests on determining the will of the voters of Florida, and this new evidence makes it extremely hard for the Bush forces to ignore the people's will,'' he said.
Eskew, the spokesman for the Texas governor, flatly rejected it as ''hocus-pocus'' and ''an utterly unfounded scientific process.''
In addition to mistakenly assuming that voters handing in undervotes intended to vote, he said, the analysis also ignores the notion that many of the double-punched ballots may have been ''protest votes,'' intentionally spoiled.
''That is a deeply flawed model that suggests statistical voodoo,'' he said.
There are, however, ways of analyzing the data that attempt to account for the possibility of protest votes and deliberate nonparticipation in the presidential balloting. Even so, Gore hypothetically still would have collected enough votes to change the election's outcome.
Historically, about 2 percent of votes in presidential races don't count -- most often because voters skipped the race or their marks weren't recorded by counting machines. Florida's rejection rate this year, however, was around 3 percent.
The analysis tested even higher percentages of nonvotes, ranging from 10 to 90 percent of the 185,000 discarded ballots. In each instance, Gore still earned more votes.
The analysis also attempted to discard all undervotes as intentional nonvotes, counting only overvotes. That analysis was hampered by the fact that 37 counties did not differentiate in their reports between ballots discarded as undervotes and those discarded as overvotes.
But based on results from the 30 counties that did, 43 percent of the uncounted votes were undervotes. If that pattern held statewide and every undervote were tossed out, ignoring the entire chad issue, Gore still would have a 13,000-vote margin.
Assuming the overvotes are protests and counting just the undervotes leads to a similar result.
STANDARDS CRUCIAL
That analysis underscores, however, the importance of the debate over the standards for judging ballots with dimpled chads, swinging door chads and other variations.
For example, if the undervotes are counted using the experience of Broward's manual recount, where approximately 20 percent of the undervote ballots yielded a vote, Gore's net statewide total rises by about 1,500 -- enough to overcome Bush's 537-vote official margin.
But if the standard used is the much stricter one that prevailed in Palm Beach County, where only 5 percent of the undervote ballots yielded votes, Gore's statewide net gain would be about 390 votes, not enough to overcome Bush's lead.
That, however, is the only scenario in which Gore would not overtake Bush. Overall, the analysis suggests generally that Gore's gains would top Bush's, a challenge to assertions by the Bush camp that the Texas governor would prevail in a statewide recount.
Republicans and some analysts didn't think the results were strong enough to stand up.
ANALYSIS REVIEWED
MacManus, the USF political scientist, echoed Eskew's concerns about protest and apathetic votes. She also said there were such wide variances in the size and the social and economic mix of precincts that it would be too difficult to extrapolate accurate results.
''In polls, you're used to a margin of error,'' she said. ''Here, there's no room for margins of error.''
Others saw more validity in the analysis.
''You can always raise criticisms. You can never know for sure,'' said Alan Agresti, a professor of statistics at the University of Florida who reviewed the methodology. ''But I think when you do it at a very fine level like this, at the precinct level, it's very interesting, a good projection of what could have happened.''
Jim Kane, an independent pollster based in Fort Lauderdale, agreed that the analysis contained many uncertainties. But he also said, ''I'm not shocked that Gore would have won.''
In fact, Kane, Agresti and Doig agreed that the formula probably was conservative, awarding Bush too large a share of the pie. The biggest problems with rejected ballots were in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods statewide -- areas that voted heavily Democratic. That could suggest that the same group, which included a larger percentage of first-time and less educated voters, might have made similar errors in all precincts.
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, also found the numbers persuasive.
''It's perfectly scientific, if it's presented in a sense as the most massive statewide poll in Florida,'' he said. ''Sure, it's fun and games, but it says something about what would have happened if everybody knew how to vote.''
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