ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting

jehnx writes "Following Google's crackdown on 'domain tasters', ICANN has voted unanimously to eliminate the free period that many domain buyers have been taking advantage of. At the same meeting they also discussed Network Solutions' front running but took no action on it."

Comments

Network Solutions

[Kagura]

Network Solutions recently released a comment on their supposedly unscrupulous business practices. They claim that their automatic registration of domain names that were searched for was an effort to stem the problem of domain tasters. I have a hard time believing that.

Where's the tag?

[Aladrin]

I expected to see a 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense' tag on this one, but maybe I saw it before it had time to be tagged.

In this case, it doesn't seem to be a sudden outbreak, though... Reading the notes (yeah, I RTFA) I can see that with the possible exception of Bruce Tonkin (who dropped off the call because of possible conflict of interest, thus making him a good guy no matter his opinion on this matter) everyone agreed that any measure except removing of the Add Grace Period (AGP) would be ineffective and only cause other harm to the community.

It's also obvious from the notes that they've spent no little time thinking about this, and they had their arguments ready. And when talking was done, they were ready to do the right thing. All of them, unanimously.

It was unclear whether the 21-day period was in effect, though... They talked about having to notify the public of policy changes 21 days in advance or more. Even if it is, 3 weeks is pretty short.

They could deal with an actual problem instead...

[damn_registrars]

Is domain tasting really the most important problem that ICANN could sink its teeth into?

I say no.

ICANN has the role of accreditation of domain name registrars themselves (particularly for .com, .net, .org, .info domains). But yet they chose to remain toothless in all but the most very extreme cases of bad registrar services.

Bad registrars, such as pacnames.com, yesnic.com, and more recently mouzz.com, are willing partners in the international spamming epidemic. They have or still do sell domains to computer criminals, willingly accepting bogus data from these criminals in exchange for a kickback.

If ICANN really wants to make a positive difference on the internet, they need to flex their muscle and make use of their ability to un-accredit bad registrars. Why they continue to neglect the opportunity to do so is beyond me.

Impact on registrars like GoDaddy?

[StringBlade]

I wonder what impact this will have on registrars such as GoDaddy.com who (according to Wikipedia) have 55.1 million domain names registered a year of which 51.5 million are canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period.

While GoDaddy.com doesn't get to keep that money, it does generate a revenue flow. That is, GoDaddy.com must return the money, but there's no requirement to cut a check that day. It may be a week or three before GoDaddy.com has to cut a refund check. In the meantime they have money to work with much like banks do. Most businesses operate on revenue flow and not strictly the net balance they have available at any one time.

If ICANN drops this grace period and domain tasters drop away (possible if unlikely) that leaves GoDaddy.com with 51.5 million domains at $10 per domain (or $515 million) in revenue flow that just dried up. That's a lot of money to just disappear from your business finances.

IANAA, but I think that this decision will have the most impact on large registrars. Perhaps a one day grace period for people who honestly made a mistake would have been more appropriate. One day is not enough to get a domain properly "tasted" because it takes about that long for the DNS entry to propagate through the network, and by the time it was out the domain would either be permanent or gone.