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Verisign To Sell DNS Root Server Lookup Data?
An anonymous reader writes "According to an editorial at Domain Name News, Verisign is considering selling partial access to DNS root server lookup data. The data would be made available to registrars, who in turn could use it for 'traffic-tasting' non-existent domains entered by any internet user. This would give them a better idea about what bogus domains to put up sites on to capture eyeballs." Haven't seen this story elsewhere and it's based on an anonymous source; YMMV.
I see no problem with this.
Does Verisign do anything anymore that isn't just to make a bigger buck, the rest of the world be damned?
Well at least now absolutely everyone can get "what you need, when you need it."
Most residential and business users will be behind a local DNS server, which probably caches the nameservers for individual TLDs. Since those NS entries on the root servers generally have a 48-hour cache time (and many ISPs DNS servers are probably (mis)configured to hold the data for longer), it doesn't seem like many requests would actually be getting through to Verizon's root servers, especially not enough to make a service like this viable.
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
I remember when registration of domains was free, all you had to do was figure out how to fill out the paperwork.
So they sell the data, new domains are registered, and the sites that go up on these domains will be loaded with pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-offs, and pop-up-ur-as* windows.
Sounds like enabling spam to me!
I personally am very against something like this. I've heard of several people just typing a domain name into Internet Explorer, seeing that it didn't exist, and then moments later trying to register the domain only to find that it was just barely registered by some registrar. Of course in these cases, Microsoft or possibly some spyware company was the culprit, but I'd hate for this information to be more quickly and widely available. I can't see how anyone would be OK with this.
$ dig a.com
$ dig b.com
. . .
$ dig aaaaaaaaa.com
$ dig aaaaaaaab.com
. . .
$ dig zzzzzzzzz.com
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
That would lead them to procuring unregistered domain names with squatting in mind. Against competition and reason.
Read radical news here
> it doesn't seem like many requests would actually be getting through
When the caching server misses on a request, it forwards the request upstream...ultimately ending up at one of the root servers.
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Haven't seen this story elsewhere and it's based on an anonymous source;
So the dot is now waiting to confirm the stories in the national press before posting them?
Think Deeply.
I check what domains are free by using dig and then looking for NXDOMAIN. This helps to get around any registrar looking at their logs to see what domains people have looked up as free. (I use my own dns server so the queries go to the root servers first)
I am sick of sites being taken by domain squatters.
I thought I had a great thing with dig (or nslookup) but that might end if that data is going to be sold too. So then what's the point.
Some data shouldn't be sold.
Educate me...
I can't remember an instance where I was trolling for a domain I didn't know, like HotelsInIshpeming.com, landed on a cybersquatter AND saw an ad that I clicked on. "Oh, look, they have percale sheets on sale at Ikea... click, click, spend... Ok, where was I... oh yes... HotelsInIshpeming...."
Are we, the clicking public, this A.D.H.D.?
I've never inquired about a domain unless I was ready to buy it on the spot. I assumed that someone could keep a record of searches (I do on my sites).
Looks like paranoia is just being sensibly cautious - again.
Why don't more domain owners take the reasonable step of registering typod variations on their name at the time they set up the property? While obviously this isn't practical for tiny or personal sites, it's reasonable to expect that a major company with the funding isn't going to balk at an extra few hundred dollars to get all common variations on the domain they want. Honestly, if you don't claim the name, you have no right co complain when someone else registers it and puts whatever they want on it.
...mistyped addresses. The operators of the root servers for the TLD are in the best position to provide this. They do not need to see every request. Cybersquatters would be very interested in registering these domains for crappy stuff like this.
If you're in a corporate office with a correctly configured caching DNS box, the spelling errors should outnumber the correctly entered queries. As seen from the root servers.
That is because every spelling error must be sent upstream while just about every correctly entered query should be cached locally.
Great. Not only are whois queries bugged by domain prospectors, a.k.a. squatspecting (don't check for the availability of a domain unless you intend to buy it immediately, because someone else is watching and will do so instead), but now just trying them in your browser will tip off others who will buy your ideas for domains out from under you.
Now after you try a URL in your browser and get an error saying the domain doesn't exist, you can just wait one minute and try again and someone will have it up and ready to serve you porn.
This is "Do More Evil".
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I just wish they would get rid of the ability to even "taste" domains. It would do away with so much junk. I got a few phishing emails that looked like something official from Bank of America. I forwarded to BoA, I also contacted the hosting company that the domain where the email came from and the site was hosted was in violation of their TOS. A few days later some lacky, know-nothing, replied back stating that the domain wasn't there and asking if I was sure I didn't make a typo. I did a frickin' copy-n-paste. I replied back it was there, on their servers, and that they should have evidence in their log files that they created the domain on their servers.
Never heard anything back. That's one "hosting" company I'll never use.
This is basically done already. Squatters can buy a domain, and due to the rules that ICANN setup (I think it's ICANN), they can return the domain for free within something like five days. During those five days, they put up a squatting page and keep track of all the hits their site gets, if it gets X number of hits, they keep the domain, otherwise they drop it. All for free.
I recently did a search for a domain on GoDaddy, the domain was available. Three days later when I went to buy it, it was not available and had been recently bought by a squatter or reseller or something. This is a whole different problem altogether and another flaw in the system. Anyways, I made it a point not to go to that site to make sure I didn't give them any hits that would encourage them to keep it.
Either way, I just bought another available domain and use that. Can't be too picky these days.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Then it's too late because someone else thought of them or found one you missed. Then the price for a domain with a good registrar/dns provider isn't cheap. No I am not talking about some cheap godaddy like service I am talking about a dns service which can garentee that lookups won't take more then 150ms to lookup. Which in the end does make the site seem faster.
People hate domain squatters for a reason. They are annoying and stealing customers/time/resources from those people that built up their brand (their domain name). They are people that don't want to make a significant amount of effort to make money The ones that don't mind taking a penny from the 'donate a penny to the homeless shelter'.
I like dyndns.com btw.
Besides, Verisign operates only a fraction of the root servers:
http://root-servers.org/
So, reason #N+1 why this data might or might not be worth a bucket of warm piss, with N+2 being as how anycasting biases requests in a more or less geographic fashion.
Meh.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Changing your dns servers to point to the opendns servers will fix many of the typosquatting problems people have:
http://www.opendns.com/
Best of all, it is free.
If the verisign DNS servers track foreign domain names (*.cn, for example), then it would be worth having. I've seen plenty of spamvertised domains that are from foreign registries, and often the registrars over there don't play by our rules. If the verisign registry gave us that data, we could at least figure out who is responsible for the existence of such crap.
And yes, I do recognize that getting something done about it is a different issue entirely. But if the data was at least available, it could help.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Does anyone actually buy anything from those bogus domains, or are they all making their money by what is essentially click fraud? Most of them seem to just deliver ads from the usual ad services.
We've been demoing our filter for bogus on-line businesses, SiteTruth, for a while now. Remember "on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog?" SiteTruth can usually kick the dogs out.
The basic concept is to try to find the business behind the domain. If the web site isn't selling anything and isn't running ads, it's not rated. If it's selling something, there needs to be a business address on the site, preferably one that matches up with business records. So we look through the site for addresses, check SSL certs, look at business directories, do some crunching, and come up with a rating automatically. This is effective against link farms, spam blogs, landing pages, and most of the other trash on the Web.
We use the ratings to reorder search results. We don't block suspicious sites; they just move down in search results. It's a clue stick to apply to suspicious sites - be clear about who's behind the site, or be ignored.
This is an alpha test demo, set up as a search engine web site. The real version will be a browser plug-in. Meanwhile, feel free to try out SiteTruth and complain where appropriate; that's why we're in test. There's a link to the SiteTruth blog on the site if you want to comment. The most interesting searches to try are for heavily spammed keywords, like "herbal viagra" or "london hotels". If your own domains get low ratings, click on the rating icons to find out why. If you're legit, it's usually because the web site has some easy to fix problem.
We've been hearing some grumbling from a few domain owners about this, which indicates we're on the right track. They usually have some long, whiny explanation of why they shouldn't have to disclose the address of their "online business". Tough.
aww so if everyone on slashdot goes to www.fuck-you-verisign.com, that won't show up as the #1 non existant domain visited when they look? Darn! I was gonna highly recommend that. I dunno, I think it'll work. Cuz aren't there some crappy, little ISP branches that wouldn't have their own DNS servers and just let everything go right up to a main one? I mean even my road runner DNS servers at this very moment are in Kansas according to their WHOIS and I live in an area Wisconsin with almost 100,000 people so they're not using a "local" one exactly.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
This is how you fix this problem...
Write a perl script that generates fake domains and then does a DNS lookups against them. Thus ensuring that their busy reserving "www.luckylinuxsexmonkeypants.com"
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
We have known for years that Verisign is a badly behaved company. This is just the latest example. I just don't understand why ICANN renewed their contract. Like Diebold and SCO, this is a company that we don't need.
would be to use it to provide insight on traffic and request patterns for known malware distribution sites, the RBN, and other known bad-actors who are engaged in criminal schemes using DNS morphing techniques to fool people into landing on their sites...
Hmmm... probably not a lot of money in that for them tho...
This sort of speculation is not a new phenomenon. It's been true for centuries in real estate: you buy some property not because it's useful to you, but just to charge whomever it is useful to a hefty price. At some level, this is just an inevitable feature of an open market, and must be tolerated (unless you lack a brain and like the idea of some Big Brother Tsar handing out domain names to whomever "deserves" them most).
But real estate speculation also provides an interesting possible solution: real estate taxes. Since real estate taxes are usually some percentage of the market value, they become very high on property that has a high market value -- so high that you can't afford them unless you are using the property to generate the maximum possible income. Speculators tend to be squeezed out of the market, since they can't afford the taxes required to "park" the property until the price is bid up high enough to suit their taste. So, one solution is to tax internet domains, with the tax reflecting the market value of the domain. That would certainly cut down on speculation, but, like all asset taxes, it's bound to depress creativity and economic growth.
Another solution comes from compulsory licenses in patent law, where the idea is that if you patent an invention and then fail to work the patent, or license it on reasonable terms -- where, alas, a court has to interpret what "reasonable" means -- then other folks can just use your patent without coming to any licensing agreement with you. I suppose the equivalent here would be that if you sit on a domain and don't use it yourself and won't sell it at a "reasonable" cost, then DNS service would be switchable to someone who will use it, even if you don't agree. I suspect this is most likely to become widespread, and I think it's already happening to some extent.
Finally, the classic libertarian idea would be to break the concept that there must be a single, worldwide, one-to-one mapping between DNS name and IP address, i.e. more or less abandon the idea of domain name registration entirely. In this strange anarchic world, you, an aspiring domain-name user, would simply start using the domain name and publish your associated IP address on some DNS server. Presumably you'd have to pay, at first, to get some servers to list your IP address.
But if your particular IP becomes the preferred association with that domain name, something the market would quickly decide, then it becomes advantageous for more and more DNS servers e.g. run by ISPs to list your IP address block for the domain name without charging you. Indeed, you might be able to charge them at some point for the privilege. To some extent this model already exists in the world of business-speak, which is why a Mac is not a "PC," even though "PC" stands for "personal computer." IBM's product named "PC" so dominated the 80s market for microcomputers that it became impossible to say "PC" without meaning "IBM-compatible microcomputer." Good thing IBM was not able to file for trademark protection on the phrase "personal computer" . . .
Of course, the fact that trademark law exists at all says that the completely free-market solution is not likely to work. Still, it would be interesting to develop some system where the preference of the global market of users has influence on who "owns" a particular domain name. The present gold-rush first come first served system has obvious disadvantages, and little other than simplicity to recommend it.
Yes, but if it still hits on a known TLD, chances are good that their nameserver will have the NS records for that TLD cached, so the request itself won't hit the root nameservers. If someone requests www.gogle.com, and their local nameserver doesn't have anything cached for the "gogle.com." domain, it'll still likely have the NS records for "com." cached, and thus skip the root nameservers.
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
so what does a domain taste like? chocolate or vanilla?
I thought information wants to be free?
So does it, or does it not?
The sooner the whole DNS system is taken out of the control of a bunch of government sponsored & crooked spivs the better. I suggest the ITU who have looked after International Telecoms since 17 May 1865, take over the whole of the DNS as soon as possible.
Neato, I have a stalker on slashdot! I don't know that I've seen any anonymous cowards do this before...
:)
Although this person doesn't seem very original, so I suspect that someone else has done this to a different member in the past. Can anyone point me to the precedent? Maybe there's a club here on slashdot for other slashstalking victims ?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
OP has root servers confused with TLD servers. The root servers should rarely need to be queried.
This is a major privacy issue.
.com TLD server logs. I'm not sure if the root data is of any value.
... that my two cents for today
http://www.cynikal.net/users/baptista/papers/Root_Server_Privacy_Complaint.pdf
also check out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/05/dud_queries_swamp_us_internet/
Most of the hits on the roots are generated by other root servers outside the IANA / ICANN / Verisign root server complex.
The important data of interest to commerce is in the
well
regards
joe baptista
No, they don't... but let's be clear, here: the *root* server lookups won't do anyone much good.
What they have to be *selling* here would be GTLD lookups, and they don't *get* all that data... In fact, I don't think they get *most* of it.
I googled through and found that there are so many complains about GoDaddy that people's domain tasted by domain tasters in split of a second after query. How its done is still a myth that everyone just guessing there are spyware in their computer. Could that be the problem in the whois server itself? And hell is there any place that can tell us which registrars are doing these kind evil things behind? Some people recommends SnapNames to back order domains but I had a domain which been tasted by them. And why the hell are all those wangleedomains.com domain pirates still being out there?
Is there any site that has a clear guide about the dark side of domain names? I am the owner of a .net domain and I have received more than 3 emails trying to convince me to buy/backorder the .com domain and some of them are completely scam. I feel that its so god damn tired to try to buy a domain..
I'm just posting some relevant facts so people can properly judge your comments. That is not a crime, my friend.
Strictly speaking, you're right...but people don't commonly make a distinction between the root and tld servers. TFA certainly didn't. And since Verisign has both roots and com/net they certainly have the information the article's talking about. You have to read that article very literally to think they're only talking about queries that hit the root.
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You are rather amusing. Quite libelous, and horribly uninformed, but rather amusing nonetheless. You actually are much like a third-rate bully, in the fact that your odd motives far outweigh both your capabilities and your intellect. Therefore as much as I know that the best way to shoo you off is to ignore you, I just can't help but poke back at your atrociously formed "relevant facts".
Have a good day in your curious world. Frankly, if I was hoping to see more strict controls placed on anonymous cowards and their known roles around here as trolls, I'd probably be thanking you.
Although since most people browse the threads at level 1 or higher, you're comments will pass completely below the radar. Proabably better for you, as people who see it would probably think I'm talking to myself to push an anti-AC agenda anyways, which would only further discredit whatever point you think you are making.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Essentially, it's like a privately operated DNS system, but there's no reason why the result that one search engine returns would be the same as the result that another does. http://googlewikipedia/ and http://yahoowikipedia/ might return two totally different sites. However, there would probably be a lot market pressure for search engines to return semantically useful results -- an engine that took you to Encyclopedia Britannica when you put in 'wikipedia' (or Apple when you put in 'Microsoft') probably wouldn't last too long. In order for this to work, your browser would need to know the addresses of a few search engines to begin with, but this could be easily preloaded or distributed out of band.
I'm not sure this is really a better system than DNS, but if DNS becomes overburdened with bureaucracy, it might be the de facto system anyway. I know some people who pretty much don't type URLs anymore, and just type everything into the Google search box that's in their browser -- even if they know exactly what the site is, it's easier to just put it into the Google box and not have to worry about formatting, since Google will work with a fuzzier match than DNS. And many browsers will default to a search engine when a badly-formatted URL is entered already. All you'd be doing is eliminating the middle layer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That's gonna be a bitch for say, ftp, irc, mail, nntp, ntp, ssh...
Need Mercedes parts ?
Just think what Microsoft will do! They'll put MSN as The Only Search On The Web, heavily integrate it into Windows, make users jump through flaming hoops just to change the search engine, and so on.
So if search was integrated in the browser and meant to replace DNS, Linux would come with thousands of links, Yahoo will sort of half-work, Google will work great until they slightly change their API and results are, at first, mangled, and within six months, unusable, the other search engines are either terribly limited or doomed to disappearance in a year, and so on.
Apple will provide a seamless experience, as usual. But you have to buy a Mac and a subscription to Apple.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
I hear they're also big on damning people...
Aah. I was unaware that Verisign owns the .com/.net nameservers. In that case the plan is much more sensible. Also, you should never assume that someone posting on /. has read TFA. ;)
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
If it werent for Amazon's patent, Verisign would probably like to add buy it now pages on the non-resolving dns names....
Nothing I say is libelous. Maybe in you feel I spout lies, but the facts are clear.
Bottom line is, there is no disputing that you did not answer a simple question to back up a claim you made. That is fact, and casts a bad light on you as a contributor.
And all your base are belong to us?
On top of the fact that your questions don't deserve being answered, your claims are not backed up by facts. If you look at my posting history, you will see that many of my past comments in other threads have been moderated +5. Your claim of my being a troll just simply doesn't hold water
But I'll let you continue answering captchas and previewing your own typos as you try to make this odd claim. I guess if it somehow makes you feel better about yourself, feel free to keep up this charade. In the meantime, people will continue to ignore you, as your comments will all remain scored 0.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They wouldn't let them "monetize" missed lookups directly, so they're farming it out to domain pirates.
It's corrupting the top level either way.
Your insistence to not read the slashdot FAQ is amusing, for sure. If you were to read it, you would find that the default reading level for browsing slashdot discussions is 1. Sure, even anonymous cowards like you are free to change their own viewing level, all the way down to -1 (to see all the trolls posted by other anonymous cowards) or all the way up to 5 (to see only the moderators' favorites).
Basically, the only reason someone would read at -1 is if they are incredibly bored or if they have moderator points and they have an interest in the topic and they haven't posted into this discussion. Because of course the FAQ will also tell you that you cannot assign moderator points to a discussion that you have posted to.
I'll let you speculate as to how many people on slashdot would meet those three criteria at this point, considering this is a response to a story that was posted 24 hours or more ago.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
> Also, you should never assume that someone posting on /. has read TFA. ;)
Ain't that the truth. Honestly, the article wasn't very clear...they said "root nameservers" but they sure implied com/net.
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verisgn and verizon are different.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Because domain tasting is free, it's easy to do brute-force searches for useful keywords; all it takes is opportunity cost on your credit card and remembering to return the unsuccessful names before your 5 days expires. It doesn't take a lot of time to see if you're getting enough random hits to make more than $6 a year at your current ad banner rates, and why should you care if you're littering the domain name space and thrashing your domain name registrar and the central registry with transactions? And until domain tasting stops being free, this abusive behaviour will continue, and apparently enough of the registrars are making money on the successful hits or they'd have started charging for transactions.
This new approach that Verisign's allegedly thinking about may reduce that - it'll help deliberate typosquatters, but the shotgun players can look at the hit rates directly and decide what to buy instead of constantly thrashing the transaction systems. It sounds like they've put some thought into their market, handing out chunks of data so multiple customers can play, as opposed to putting out a master list that lets everybody race to register the same domain names. It'll save VS money on transaction costs that they're not currently getting reimbursed for, and it'll mean that multiple domain tasters aren't thrashing the same namespace constantly.
This also means that if you're trying to get a domain name because you have actual content to provide, or think it sounds cool, or whatever, you're not going to miss it because some speculative domain taster has it in their 5-day grip. If it makes much more than $6/year in advertising revenue you'll probably lose it either way, but at least you won't lose it because of inefficiencies in the process.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But another kind are the speculative domain tasters, who register large numbers of potentially useful names and return them before the 5-day grace period unless they're going to make more than $6/year in banner ads. ICANN's Soviet-central-planners have decided that the Registry won't charge transaction costs on that, so it doesn't cost anything to search except opportunity cost and credit card balance. It's certainly simple to fix that without compulsory licensing or complex "taxes" based on some perceived "value" of a domain name or some bogus plan for requiring name buyers to provide "actual content" - either don't return the customer's money if they don't like the name, or at least charge some fixed price for the transaction even if you're returning all or half of their fee. There'll still be some market for this kind of fishing, but it's much smaller.
ICANN is currently evaluating the issue, though their is over. (Poll Results!) The article commented that Verisign may be proposing to do this as a way to make money off the speculators if ICANN does get rid of domain tasting.
Individual registrars can already avoid having to deal with domain tasters - they can set their fees at a price that makes it unattractive to use them even though ICANN's making the registry return their part of the fee. That doesn't eliminate the practice unless all the registrars stop doing it, and there are apparently enough registrars that make money off of speculative parasites that they're tolerating the extra transaction load - but Verisign's $6 fee was never particularly cost-based anyway, so the registrars can keep their costs low by automating the process heavily.
Comments on "value" of a name, and on providing "real content". Until strong AI shows up, there'll be no easily automated way to distinguish between real human-provided content and bogus astroturf, and certainly not without burning huge quantities of CPU and database storage, and if strong AI ever does show up, it'll be no more interested in reading those web pages than real humans are. The speculative domain tasters are often going to generate lots of astroturf for their pages to try to attract traffic from search engines as well. Also, what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable. For domainers, it's the amount of money they think they can make from owning the name, but for real companies in real business, it's tied into the whole advertising and branding space. DotCom Boom companies were often somewhere in between real companies and bogus ones (was DogFoodOnline.Com a good idea or a silly way to extract money from overexcited VCs? Only your sock puppet knows for sure...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Some very interesting comments.
This I think is wrong, however:
what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable
The value of a name is very quantifiable. It's the price the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. You can ask the same question, and get the same answer, when you ask what the value of real estate is. The fact that we have very limited insight into the mechanism by which people judge the value of things doesn't change the fact that they can and do, and we can measure that value quite precisely merely by noting the price they bid for them.
It won't all go away, but it'll at least make it easier to find the fraudulent thieving abusers who are currently masked by all the noise.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But there's a big demand for names made of perfectly legal collections of keywords that people happen to type into their browsers, which can generate banner-ad revenues, as well as increasing the probability that somebody typing those things into search engines will find your content-free page full of plausible astroturf. The current domain-tasting rules say that you can register a domain name and return it within five days in case you made a "mistake" in your registration, and the obvious "mistake" is that not enough people are hitting your page at random to generate enough banner ad revenue to make it worth buying the page. So there's a huge business in people kiting domain names, registering them for 3-4 days to see if they get enough hits to keep the name and then dumping them, and either putting a generic under-construction banner ad page or a slightly more customized page like "Want to get more info about the Squeamish Ossifrage market? Here are the hottest new sites!"
The domain-tasting name-kiting business means there's a huge transaction load on the registrars and the registry - the registrars could avoid it if they want by not refunding their markups on the basic registrar fee (some do, some don't, so there's obviously some profit for them) but the centralized registrar that runs .com is stuck with it because of ICANN policy, and that's Verisign. The transactions don't cost them anything close to the $6 they charge to register a name for a year, but they're still expensive. For the rest of us, the name-tasters litter the namespace making it harder to find real sites among the trash, and making it harder to find meaningful names when you've got actual content that you want to create a website for.
ICANN's evaluating whether to change the policies on free domain tasting - either eliminating the refund or at least charging a "restocking" transaction fee would cut down on a lot of the kiting. If VRSN sells a list of popular misses, it'll appeal to the same people who are doing the kiting, but it'll at least let them just buy the names that might make money and not litter the rest of the space.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
registrar doing this kind of thing is illegal. the top provider of some resources, registrar is roughly the monopoly when it comes to selling domains. registrar(s) actually, in bulk. therefore if a registrar is freely allowed to squat in this manner, then the users dont have a chance. this almost resembles a total monopoly situation.
Read radical news here
I don't know if this applies to all of the specialized TLDs -
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
technically they are not a monopoly, from individual registrar to individual registrar. BUT, if you take them as registrarS, they are a monopoly in respect to customers, since the all top level registrars constitute the entirety of the domain name distribution rooftop. And if they all freely employ this whois data trick, that directly creates a monopoly situation in which the monopolist (all registrars in this case) can provide themselves preferential treatment when it comes to domain name registrations.
Read radical news here
If you go to Registrar A and check the availability of Yet-Another-Example.com, Registrar A and the Registry can see that you looked for it, but Registrar B can't. The Registry is a monopoly that you can't avoid - but if you think Registrar A are domain-name-stealing scum who are going to register the name out from under you if you don't pay for it right then, you don't need to use them - you can use a registrar that's more ethical, such as Registrar B (ok, probably B, C, D... W are scum, but X, Y, and Z aren't...) There are registrars with a reputation for ethics and privacy protection, just as there are registrars with reputations for low cost or good wholesaler support or efficient name stealing. It's nothing close to monopolistic - you really can pick the ones you want to deal with. Any of them _could_ act like scum, but many of them don't, and other people can become registrars by paying ICANN their fee, and it only takes *one* ethical registrar to give you a way to avoid dealing with scum (unlike the registries, which are monopolies for their TLDs, so the only way to avoid them is to get a name in a different TLD.)
The other way to check name availability is DNS - the root and some TLDs have distributed name service managed by multiple entities, while others have one centralized entity that runs all the authoritative servers for that TLD's zone. If somebody does a lookup for an existing name, they may get the answer from the authoritative server, but usually their ISP's DNS servers are keeping a cache of queries, so they'll get the answer from the cache. But if they do a looking for a nonexistent name, like Example-I-Just-Made-Up-Now.com, it won't be in their ISP's cache, so their ISP will query the TLD's authoritative server, which will say it doesn't exist. That does mean that Verisign, who control the authoritative DNS for
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
technicality on the approximations of top level of the domain name system doesn't matter. if this is allowed, inevitably many registrars are going to follow suit for all registries, and eventually there is going to be a situation in that this is a widely adopted practice. yes, its not technically a monopoly, but you'll be hard pressed to find the domain name you want vacant. why just rent a domain name to some 3rd party for $8-10 a year, whilst you can park it on your ad page as registrar and enjoy around $100-1000 revenues in hits.
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Domain names don't work like that (though there are exceptions.) There are some names like sex.com that are sufficiently generic that people are going to buy them speculatively (or steal them speculatively
Sex.com is part of a neighborhood where comparables exist and a legitimate auction process is possible. Google.com isn't - it's only valuable because Google named themselves that. obscure-Web2dot0-marketdroidia.com isn't either - it's only valuable because some obscure web2.0 marketdroids named their company that, even though it's obviously worth less than google.com because the company's going to vanish before they get their 15 minutes of fame. DeadDotComillenium.com might have a value, because it might be possible to have a legitimate auction depending on what happened to the trademark when the dotcom who used to own it died (did the trademark get sold off along with the fancy chairs, or did it just die?)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks