ICANN proposes clampdown on domain tasting

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 31 January 2008 10:18

Your IT - Home IT

ICANN is finally planning action against domain tasting - the practice of registering a domain with the intention of cancelling within the five-day grace period if it does not attract sufficient traffic. But don't expect anything to happen before June.

The current policy is that if a registration is deleted within the grace period, the ICANN fee will be credited back to the registrar concerned. This practice was instituted to allow for typos and other mistakes made when registering a domain.

But the absence of any penalty meant those seeking effective domain names could register thousands of variations with no financial risk as they would back out of the process for any low-performing names.

Tasting is often used to pick up batches of unrenewed domain names as they expire, as it allows tasters to see which names still bring in traffic expecting the defunct site or that have intrinsic value because people are inclined to type them directly into their browsers' URL bar.

ICANN's proposed solution is to levy its annual fee immediately, removing the grace period. "Charging the ICANN fee as soon as a domain name is registered would close the loophole used by tasters to test a domain name’s profitability for free," said ICANN president and CEO Paul Twomey.

According to ICANN, in January 2007 the top ten domain tasters accounted for 95 percent of all deleted .com and .net domain names. But it's the scale of the issue that makes it a problem.  Those ten were responsible for 45,450,897 deletions.

Domain tasting is also allegedly used by some registrars. When someone investigates the availability of a particular domain name using their systems, the registrar immediately registers the name to itself. In its milder form, this can merely make it difficult for people to shop around for the best deal from different registrars; at worse, an unscrupulous registrar could offer the name to the would-be customer at an inflated price.

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