MARINA DEL REY, CA - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as ICANN, announced late Sunday the immediate creation of a new top level domain, .bkt, to be used by web sites hosting NCAA men's and women's championship pick-em competitions.
"We estimated that approximately 33 million new pages were created late Sunday directly related to the creation of sponsored competition to try and select the winners of this year's men's, and to a lesser degree, women's college basketball champions," noted ICANN Chairman Esther Dyson.
"We decided that to facilitate this major new category of Internet activity, that for efficiency and ease, a new top level domain should be created. The new dot b-k-t was picked because it can stand for basket or bracket."
Top level domains are the last entry on any web site address. Some of the other more common ones include .com for commercial sites, .edu for educational sites, .org for non-profit sites, and .gov for U.S. government sites.
The NCAA basketball tournament is a three week effort to select both the men's and women's champion for the given year. Each year 64 teams are, for some unknown reason, picked in this knockout tournament, considering that maybe sixteen really have a chance of winning. Sites Web sites have found that by allowing users to try and guess the outcome of various rounds of play and offering prizes, they can increase their visibility and traffic.
The new .bkt will be in effect immediately and will be default assigned to the corresponding .com site. For example, yahoo.bkt will now take a user directly to the Yahoo! NCAA Pick'em area.
In a press release, CBS Sportsline noted that "the new cbs.sportsline.bkt domain will be of great value to us and out users making it easy for them to immediately access the contest area."
When Dyson was asked if she was concerned that some may use the .bkt domain to create NCAA hockey tournament contests, she started to laugh hysterically at the suggestion and then wiping a tear away said, "Uh, no, we are not concerned about that."
©2000 Copyright David Oliver
DISCLAIMER: These stories are not true. No really. It's all just a joke, you know for fun.
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