ICANN's batching program, called digital archery, is deeply flawed and should be abandoned before it causes havoc with the new gTLD program. As well as arbitrarily creating winners and losers, creating unfair advantages for certain types of applicants and for certain regions, the program may be suffering from another software "glitch" of the kind that damaged the application process. There is a much better solution: a single batch for all applications.
ICANN has determined that it can only evaluate 500 applications at a time. It is therefore using something called "digital archery" to separate applications into batches. An applicant picks a time, then attempts to click a mouse as close to that time as possible. The closer you are, the higher batch number you achieve. Combined with this is a round-robin method meant to assure that applications for different regions are fairly represented, though in practice it is grossly unfair. This entire program is flawed, unfair, and will create mayhem and ill-will. And it is completely unnecessary.
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