DNS Stressed From Financial Maneuverings

jcatcw writes "The Domain Name System is showing signs of being out of control. Automated software systems are being used to re-register large batches of expired domain names. In addition, speculators are using a loophole in the registration process that lets domains be tested for their potential profitability as pay-per-click advertising sites during a free five-day "tasting" period."

Comments

Re: Why is this news?

[rs79]

It was news 2 years ago when it first started happening.

ICANN which (on paper) "measures community consensus and implements it as policy" is the entity that had to approve the policies that lets this happen.

No domain expires any more, the registrars snap them up on principle, try them out and if they get one click in the "don't have to pay yet" grace period then they keep the domain. Very very few, if any domains actually expire back into the free pool.

What strikes me as hysterical is the people that went on to become ICANN accused the alternative root people 10 years ago of wanting to do exactly this. To be honest we hadn't even thought of it. We just wants to see no centralized single-point-of-failure control over the dns.

I note with irony itoldyouso.com is taken by squatter.

I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[khasim]

And I completely disagree with it.

If you want to test the domain, then LEASE the domain name. None of this automated click-count crap for free while other people who would USE the domain name wait to see if it will ever be available.

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[eln]

I agree. I don't understand why this is even offered. The only reason you would want to know how many hits your potential site would get based on its domain name alone is because you were counting on accidental traffic for all or the majority of your income. This pretty much means you're a squatter looking to capitalize on ad impressions. If you're a legitimate business looking to start a web presence, you're going to just buy a domain that pertains to your business, and ADVERTISE it. Then, people who are interested will visit the domain you have advertised.

I could see offering a trial period if a domain name cost $10,000 or something (and maybe they should), but these days you can buy domain names for pretty much nothing anyway, so a trial period is utterly pointless.

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[shmlco]

No leasing, no tasting, and price a .com domain somewhere from $100 to $1,000 a year to register and maintain. No automated renewals. Registrants need to have a valid address and email address, and be validated similar to what occurs when you try to get a SSL certificate.

And no squating. If you sitting on that domain name primarily to offer it for sale then it returns to the pool. No parking. No ad/link farms. If you have address.com and you went out of business then you went out of business. Sorry.

This is why we have Flickr, and Digg, and all of those other "mispelled" domain names. All single words are used up. All three and four and most five letter acronyms are gone. Double-word combinations are getting there. Common words with i or my are few and far between.

A friend tried to get a .org domain for an open-source project, only to find some company squatting on it, and offering to sell it for $3K. Shouldn't be legal. Names are a finite public resource and, when, no longer needed or abandoned, should be returned to the pool to be reregistered and reused.

I don't see that as the problem

[TheLink]

The problem is with the ICANN - they're mainly collecting money and doing nothing really good for the long term (they approve TLDs that are just "yet another .com"s - see any significant innovations/improvements?). A single Jon Postel could replace the entire ICANN and the world would probably be better for it.

The bigger problem is everyone currently lining up to replace ICANN is probably worse than the ICANN.

Financial maneuvering? Add political maneuvering.

Two obvious fixes

[davidwr]

Fix #1: Eliminate the free tasting period.
If you register fo0.com on May 1 and on May 2 you realize you goof and you meant to register foo.com, fine. But your registration still expires next May 1. In addition, you only get 1 or 2 "free goofs" after which you pay a paperwork fee, maybe a few pennies or less, to cover the actual costs of changing things around.
The people who run DNS should neither gain nor lose if I register 1 name for 1 year vs. I register 100 names for short consecutive periods that add up to 1 year. Currently they lose big time.

Fix #2: Meaningful domain-lapse rules
In general, if a domain is revoked or lapses, nobody except you should be able to claim it without your permission for a certain period of time. I'd suggest a minimum of 30 days.
I theory this is the way it was supposed to work but in practice ....
Obviously there will be special cases, such as names transferred by court order.

Re:Two obvious fixes

[mosch]

If you register fo0.com on May 1 and on May 2 you realize you goof and you meant to register foo.com, fine. But your registration still expires next May 1.

Screw that. If you register fo0.com and you meant to register foo.com, screw you, you're out whatever you spent ($10-35). That's a slightly annoying lesson if you're a regular person. But it would destroy the typosquatting market.

Testing period

[Anonymous Coward]

(posting anon because I used mod points)

Who does the testing period benefit besides spammers and squatters? Does someone who legitimately want to use a domain name "test" it for five days... and then what? Of course someone who wants to the domain is going to keep it. But if you don't want it, why did you register it, unless of course you were testing it for how many people accidentally typed your domain name, and then we come back to the spammers and squatters. I'd be interested in knowing a legitimate purpose for this five day testing period.

This seems to be a fairly clear problem

[pembo13]

Just don't allow it. There's no possible positive in even allowing cyberquating. If someone wants to register a website that looks like a cybersquat, attach a clause saying they have x amount of days to put up an actual website, assuming there is a port 80 attached to that domain. Or can the registrars not stay away from the easy money themselves?

Re:Well maybe its *GASP* Time for Reform

[gregmac]

This is a good idea in theory .. but how do you determine that someone is using them for a "legitimate reason" ?

Is advertising a legitimate reason? Sure, any rational person can see that the typosquatter sites are really just advertising sites, and no content. However, some of them have "search engines" (that just return advertising results..) and how can you argue that those are not legitimate, while google (also a search engine, also returns some paid results/advertising) is? If you mandate that sites have to have useful content, then they'll probably just start inserting blobs of random content, or news feeds, or something else that technically complies with the requirements. Why shut them down, but not, eg, MSN or Yahoo, which are both a bunch of ads crammed around some content?

Unfortunately I don't know how you solve the problem that way. In the end, the squatters will continue, making changes to their sites whenever you change the content requirements, and in the worst case, legitimate sites will be forced to make changes in order to comply (even though a legitimate site should never have to change, since they are legitimate).