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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."
Good.
(all other posts after this are either wrong or repeating)
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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.
Or domain kiting? In tasting, customers register the domain for 5 days and use that up and then let it expire. In kiting, they delete the domain before the grace period is up and then re-register for another 5 day grace for the same domain.
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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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Is domain tasting really the most important problem that ICANN could sink its teeth into?
.com, .net, .org, .info domains). But yet they chose to remain toothless in all but the most very extreme cases of bad registrar services.
I say no.
ICANN has the role of accreditation of domain name registrars themselves (particularly for
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Is the fact that last night I was searching for a sprayfoam insulation company in maryland (using google), and the very first link that came up, was a domain taster domain registered 3 days prior to yesterday, that only had ads and click through sites on it...
It was most annoying, but the fact it came up as the first link, means google really should do soemthing about sites abusing the ranking systems and not just people abusing the adsense program.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Its a good move, but im still waiting to see some more action against domain squatters. It is so infuriating to have a good idea for a website, only to have 99% of the possible/good domain names being taken and being part of some advertizement network. And I just refuse to pay them.
Ofcourse, in economic terms, it would probably be worth it in the long run if you have a very good idea to pay some extra for the better domain name. But its like paying for "protection" money because the alternative is worse...
If pacnames, yesnic and mouzz are getting kickbacks from the criminals, maybe they are sending a cut to ICANN.
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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.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Don't taste me, bro!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
If you have a good idea for a website, pick a unique, memorable name, not an obvious one. Who's the number one auction site; auction.com or eBay? Who's the number one on-line bookseller; books.com or Amazon? What is an ebay anyway? What does a river in Brazil have to do with books? Nothing, it doesn't matter, most people are going to find your website through Google anyway rather than typing in a URL.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Along with many others, I deplored Network Solutions' preemptive domain registration which took advantage of domain tasting. However as a former beneficiary of the present domain tasting policy, I can see at least one benefit to consumers (and businesses) that gets overlooked because of the audacity of Network Solutions' behavior.
About a year ago I registered a domain that had a transliteration of a foreign word. I discovered, within a few hours, that my transliteration was not the preferred spelling (for example, "perogi" as opposed to the preferred "pirogi"). I asked my registrar to refund my money for the first domain and registered the domain with the preferred spelling.
Honest mistake and no one was harmed in the process of deleting the undesired domain. Sure, I could have researched that transliterated word before registration but it simply did not occur to me that a spelling which in my day (yeah, I'm over 40) was correct would have been superseded. (Sort of like finding out BBQ is actually spelled "barbecue".)
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