Originally Posted by polish_aristocrat

with .info introduced 4 years ago,. most ICANN accredited registrars ( and there's like 100 of them ) accepted pre-registrations and then there was a lottery at the end

to make it more precize, f.e you wanted badly a domain name like weather.info, so out of 100 registrars you made accounts with 25, with 10 you managed to be the first one to apply for weather.info ( 7 of them charged you a non refundable fee ), and in 5 other ones there was a bidding process, and ur application was submitted only if you were the highest bidder for that domain... but at the end there was a lottery for applications from all registrars for weather.info

actually weather.info is a bad example, since the best genertic .info domains were all already acquired by cheaters who claimed bogus , often completely ridicolous trademarks in some African countries for particular generic terms in the "sunrise period"