Much though I hate to disagree with my buddy Paul, lotteries to allocate "desirable" names are unlikely to produce a good result. Turn back the clock 25 years and you may remember that the FCC had lotteries to hand out cellular phone licenses. For the B licenses there was a lottery among all the phone companies in the territory, while for the A licenses there was a lottery for anyone who met the qualifications, which was a whole lot of people since one could buy a kit of qualification materials. What invariably happened was that unless the lottery winner happened to be a large telecom company that could afford to build a cell system, the winner immediately sold the license to the highest bidder, thereby turning the lottery into an auction where someone else got to keep the money. I see no way to keep that from happening here, since a no-sale rule will be both unenforcable and have perverse consequences ("oh, that wasn't a sale, that was a merger") I do have a lot of sympathy for the hybrid model of auctions to allocate commercially desirable names and directed allocation of socially desirable ones. If there's competition for a socially desirable one, pull out the thesaurus and make everyone a winner. If the applicants don't like that, they can merge their applications at any time.