Drop-Catching Domains Is Big Business

WebsiteMag brings us news from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) about a recent study of drop catching —'a process whereby a domain that has expired is released into the pool of available names and is instantly re-registered by another party.' The eleven day study showed that 100% of '.com' and '.net' domain names were immediately registered after they had been released. CADNA has published the results with their own analysis. Quoting: "The results also show that 87% of Dot-COM drop-catchers use the domain names for pay-per-click (PPC) sites. They have no interest in these domain names other than leveraging them to post PPC ads and turn a profit. Interestingly, only 67% of Dot-ORG drop catchers use the domains they catch to post these sites — most likely because Dot-ORG names are harder to monetize due to the lack of type-in traffic and because they tend to be used for more legitimate purposes."

Comments

Make em expensive again

[mingot]

Make these fuckers cost 200 a year again. It'd likely cut out a LOT of bullshit.

Re:Make em expensive again

[EvanED]

It would also cut me out. You don't need to make them terribly expensive... just $25 or so would probably be sufficient. It would at least cut that percentage down a ton.

Re:Make em expensive again

[suresk]

I agree. This is the only sensible way to solve this problem.

A while back, some friends and I were working on a business idea. Every single idea we had for a domain name was taken. I remember looking at all the sites to see what they had done with the domains, and out of 200 or so, fewer than 10 were actually doing something with the domain names aside from parking them and making money off the PPC ads.

As an example of this: I registered uresk.com (Uresk is my last name, and it is a very uncommon last name) back in 1997 or thereabouts. I was still in high school, and the $100/year ended up being prohibitively expensive so I didn't renew it. It has been passed around by speculators for almost a full decade now, despite the fact that it never had much traffic and "uresk" isn't a very common type-in. Bizarre.

Re:Make em expensive again

[sssssss27]

Couldn't you just make it progressive? Have the first cost the normal rate and then have it go up with each new one you register until you hit a predefined limit. That way people like you and I who only have a few domains wouldn't get hurt.

The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name. I imagine to solve that you could just have the count reset after so long. I imagine these drop catchers register a lot of names all the time.

Re:Make em expensive again

[sssssss27]

So should I be concerned that when mine expired no one picked it up? I'll just have to let my wife name any kids I might have...

Re:Make em expensive again

[CastrTroy]

Why not make it $100 to register, and then $5 a year to renew.

Re:Make em expensive again

[FredFredrickson]

Not only would $100 cut me out, but even $25 would cut me out. I already spend quite a bit of money keeping my websites registered at $10/month. I don't need a stupid tax to keep spammers and squatters down, because that would greatly affect my personal sites. And I don't generate much of any income on my sites, they're are mostly personal.

Strict regulation, maybe. Remove domain tasting? Yes. But raising prices for honest customers? Hell no.


A better question would be whether there's copyright infringement having somebody register a domain that uses your site's name.

Re:Make em expensive again

[armada]

All you need to do is nix the grace period. Simple. If you are not the original registered owner you have to pay full price to register it.

Re:Make em expensive again

[debatem1]

Make it a $100 deposit refundable in 6 months.

Re:Make em expensive again

[the_womble]

The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name.

If you create a site for someone else, then the domain should belong to them anyway.

Re:Make em expensive again

[larry bagina]

Copyright? No. Trademark? Yes. But you need to have a registered trademark, then you need to dispute to with ICANN, which costs $5000 or so (plus your lawyer fees), which means it's cheaper to buy it from a squatter (or not let it expire in the first place).

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only would it be unprofitable for these "drop-catcher's", it would make it much harder for spammers to run their operations as well. So I'm all for domain names at 100 per year. Or even $50. Right now a domain for 5 or 10 bucks.. at 50 it would cost all these people 5 to 10 times as much to operate. When you are talking about a few thousand domains. Well that would get really costly.

Re:Make em expensive again

[DaveWick79]

I think this is a great solution. Force the squatters to pay a lot up front, and eliminate the grace period. That way they won't want to output a lot of money, even if it's about $50, to register because they won't make enough money on the domain to make it worthwhile. I think that most people would not mind paying a bit more up front as long as renewal was easy and cheap like it is now.

While they are at it, they should make scams, like Domain Registry of America does, to deceive people into switching registrars. There should be huge fines for this kind of thing, to the tune of $1000's per domain. You've got to make it financially devestating for people to engage in nasty behavior like this.

While I don't think you can make the squatting illegal, I think you can make it harder to make money on, which will effectively eliminate within a couple of years.

Re:Make em expensive again

[curunir]

Rather than making domains prohibitively expensive (and artificially so...a database entry should not cost $100), what needs to happen is a drastic expansion of top-level domains. The shortage of domain names is entirely artificial. The problem is not that there are too many PPC sites. The problem is that these sites make those domain names unavailable for legitimate use. But if there were more top-level domains to choose from, the likelihood that legitimate users would have problems finding a suitable domain would be significantly less.

ICANN wants to keep this artificial scarcity since it enables them to propose fee increases that keep the registrars profits obscenely high. And, as evidenced by this discussion, even technophiles have bought into their BS. We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Why is there no '.music' TLD for bands and music enthusiasts? Why are there not thousands of other TLDs that are appropriate for other purposes?

Because ICANN says so. There's little to no technical reason why. And changing this makes a hell of a lot more sense than upping the registration fees. All increasing registration fees accomplishes, other than annoying PPC site operators (who will adapt, just as SPAMers adapt to every technical hurdle that is sent their way), is to funnel even more money to the registrars.

Re:Make em expensive again

[cheater512]

The Domain Registry of America never fails to send me a letter telling me to renew with them.

Even though I'm in Australia.

Re:Make em expensive again

[suresk]

Well, when you are paying for a domain name, you aren't paying for the database entry - you are paying for the right to exclusively use that particular name, right?

Creating more TLDs will probably help, but causes other problems. If I am interested in purchasing an Audi, do I go to audi.com or audi.auto? Is it permissible for me to register audi.{something} for my own use? What if I register {somedomain}.books and someone already has {somedomain}.com? That is bound to cause confusion. I don't know - I like the idea in some ways, but it seems like it would open up a whole bunch of other problems.

Re:Make em expensive again

[rtb61]

It seems to be an excellent idea, why stuff about, simply double the domain name fee for each additional domain, registered by the same company or individual.

Re:Make em expensive again

[SL Baur]

We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). .edu and .mil (and .gov) are special. They are reserved for United States institutions for education (colleges), military and the federal government respectively.

Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Because the way domain naming was designed, all such domains would be assigned under .auto.com for automobile sellers or .auto.org for the enthusiasts. It worked when only a handful of (very large) organizations had registered domain names.

The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be .japan.gov, not .go.jp) was made and everyone followed it when internet access was unleashed on the masses. National domains were politically expedient, but a stupid idea. Almost as stupid as the TLD .us being assigned geographically.

How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is <steve@romulus.sedd.trw.com> or <baur@venice.sedd.trw.com> in the 1980s.

Re:Make em expensive again

[curunir]

Well, when you are paying for a domain name, you aren't paying for the database entry - you are paying for the right to exclusively use that particular name, right?

Of course, the value of the domain is much greater than a database entry, but the cost to the registrar is the cost of a database entry (and your share of the maintenance of that database). I'm sure the $35/year the Microsoft pays Verisign is well worth the cost. But it doesn't change the fact that Verisign is probably making $34/year or more in profit.

If I am interested in purchasing an Audi, do I go to audi.com or audi.auto?

How is that different from the current situation? Sure, Audi got to their .com first, but let's say I wanted a Japanese car instead of a German one...do I go to nissan.com? With expanded TLDs, people would do what they currently do...open their browser, type what they're looking for into the Google search box and hit enter.

The thing to remember about the multiple TLDs is that it should make the part before the TLD much simpler. So instead of longasscomplicateddomain.com, you have short.something...it really wouldn't be that much more complex than our current system, if at all.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Actually, I do RTFA]

How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is or in the 1980s.

You're making me feel old...

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this rule should only apply to .com domains? If so, it shouldn't cause you any problem as you should be using .org domains anyway.

Re:Make em expensive again

[curunir]

.edu and .mil (and .gov) are special.

I know there are rules that make those domains special. But my point is that there's nothing about existing TLDs that makes them special other than the fact that ICANN has sanctioned them. They created so few originally because computers and internet connections were slow and making DNS monolithic made things work better technically. But computers are faster now and net connections are faster. There's no longer a technical reason why we can't have more TLDs.

Believe me, I know how DNS was supposed to work. I had an email address with 5 dots in it at one point (in college, I did admin on some of the CS department's boxes and we ran a mail server on one of them). But the reality is that the unwashed masses can't grok domain names as a hierarchy. The system was designed with those lofty goals, but the real world didn't realize why that design was important. But it but ran with it anyways, and now we're in our current mess. Unless you can convince cars.com, music.com, etc to become a registrars for all companies/enthusiasts/etc in that realm, you've got to look at how the situation can realistically be changed.

And we're left with two choices...a few TLDs where anything reasonable at the next level becomes extremely valuable or many TLDs to make reasonable second-level domains plentiful.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Magic5Ball]

There's no need to raise the prices, just the initial commitment. $100 per domain name, which includes 10 to 20 years of registration, would be reasonable, and would also keep domain names from dropping in the first place (but at the increased risk of having their admin/billing/technical contacts become incorrect). Having been on this Internet thing for ages now, I find far fewer compelling technical reasons for domain names to expire than business (recurring revenue) reasons.

Re:Make em expensive again

[EvanED]

I wouldn't want to do this. There are plenty of reasons why a company would, very legitimately IMHO, want to register multiple domains. First there are typos; I don't think it's reasonable to expect Google to pay through the nose to get "typoed" domains like googel.com or gogole.com (both of which they have). Maybe the need for these domains would go down a lot if there weren't squatters who would snap them up if Google didn't though, so maybe this isn't terribly convincing. (That said, Google apparently currently has 520 domains, though a ton of those are through acquisitions of other companies.)

The second big reason is that I don't think it's reasonable to prevent registering different domains for either different services or different products. For instance, msoffice.com redirects to the Office page at microsoft.com.

Now you could double to a limit, but I wouldn't make it much above $1000.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Jugalator]

They are good hearted and follow the advice given here too in making it expensive to register your domains with them. I'm sure they're just waiting for others to catch on!

Re:Make em expensive again

[dontmakemethink]

Make them expensive on a scale: first domain is $10, the 10th is $100, the 100th is $1000 etc.

And any domain registered to any corporation should be $1000 minimum.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anpheus]

That's a genius idea, I think. The barrier to entry is then sufficiently high (squatters who own thousands of domains would have to fork over much more money than they have on hand.)

This would vastly slow the ability of anyone to actually create domains. Let's say there's a squatter out there with $100,000 in the bank, they can only register 1000 domains every 6 months, and they are then out $10,000+ for the year-long registration. So if they haven't made $10,000 of those domains, they can only register another 900.

Mod parent up, I couldn't.

Re:Make em expensive again

[todd1000]

I agree, there are legit reasons to register a lot of domains. My company has probably around 1000 domains registered. We register new domains for marketing purposes to demonstrate what potential customers "portal" will look like. When they sign on, we keep re-registering the name and their customers use it to access the service.

If the potential customer does not like the name or does not sign on, we either give them the domain or let it expire. This is a small cost of doing business and is used for legitimate purposes.

The "grace period" should go, if you can't afford a few bucks on a mistake, don't register.

Re:Make em expensive again

[digitalchinky]

Why not use a subdomain if the site is for demonstration purposes? Seems like a complete waste of money and potentially good domain names. You register them and when they expire some idiot snaps them up and uses them for link farming.

It's not about a few dollars, it's about laying waste to the whole domain registration process. What good is it if the only thing left to register is a string of random characters.

Re:Make em expensive again

[KnightTristan]

For an obvious reason of course ... If you know the name of /anything/ (be it a company, band, organisation), the first thing you're gonna try is anything.com. You don't want to remember anything.anywhere because anywhere is rather "arbitrary". Yeah, you could go like .auto is for car dealers and .music is for bands, but where does a dealer of auto radios go? No sir, a wildgrow of top-level domains shall only pollute the domain name landscape.

Domain name parking should be dealt with, that's for sure.

Tristan

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up

Re:Make em expensive again

[SL Baur]

I've had !'s in my email address. As was posted here not too long ago, I just happened to be working for one of the first companies on the internet at the time they got their domain name.

It used to be that you wanted to get email from strangers ... Thank God Microsoft fixed that.

Re:Make em expensive again

[rtb61]

With a limited number of readily memorable and understandable words to be shared amongst hundreds of mliions of companies and individuals, there is no sane reason to allow squatters top mindlessly hoard hundreds of domain names and not use sub-domains. Australia is very strict with it's domain naming system and a company must have a registered business name prior to obtain a matching or nearly matching domain name.

For approximately 99% of the population it will have a positive effect and only the greediest 1% will have their activities curtailed, so is that inherently not the whole idea of appropriate legislation.

Re:Make em expensive again

[todd1000]

We do use subdomains a lot, but we're a wholesale hosting company. We usually register something like somecompanyhosting.com for the bigger prospects.

It's not really usefull for spammers, the domain does not get used for the public. The domain points to a login page. It is a "personal touch" for new customers, then if they sign on, most of the time their customers use it to log on to the control panel or they use it for sales to new customers.

As for "waste of money", the $10 or so for a domain name is nothing. Just a guess, but I'm sure it costs us way more than $10k to get a larger customer.

Re:Make em expensive again

[CastrTroy]

Also, since they don't really need all that money to register domains, they should give the money to charity, rather than to line some executive's pockets.

Re:Make em expensive again

[petermgreen]

People generally expect website urls, email addresses etc to remain the same over a long time. If a TLD has had strict policies from the start then I have no problem with that but I wonder if there is any good way to kill off the existing squatters without hurting those legitimate operations who have ended up with thier stuff spread accross multiple domains.

Re:Make em expensive again

[petermgreen]

look at what happened when they introduced info and biz, everyone legit stayed where they were and info and biz became nothing but another place for spammers to abuse.

I'm in favour of new TLDs but only if those tlds have strict rules about who can register what in them. A greater number of "anyone can register anything" style TLDs (of which there are already loads) would bring nothing of value IMO.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Veamon]

Who cares if your name matches your idea. Does "flikr" mean anything? Twitter? de.li.cous or whatever? Its hip to not match, just throw a lowercase "i" in front of your name, take out a vowel in the middle and you're set.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Exactly. I don't see why we need all these "convenient" arrangements with grace periods this and reduced charges that for organisations the other who have privileged access to the system. All these arrangements ever do is support people who are abusing the domain system by grabbing expired domains or (as discussed here a few days back) those that someone has expressed an interest in via a look-up, at sub-normal rates that make them attractive as advertising platforms.

Does anyone know the politics behind this? Surely Joe's Random DNS Registry doesn't set the policies that allow this, so why doesn't the central organisation (is it ICANN in this context?) just get rid of the cheap-and-temporary stuff that screws pretty much any legitimate registrant?

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If a TLD has had strict policies from the start then I have no problem with that but I wonder if there is any good way to kill off the existing squatters without hurting those legitimate operations who have ended up with thier stuff spread accross multiple domains.

I don't think that would be a huge problem in practice. Most people abusing the system don't keep the domains they grab for very long. They just step in for a few days, take advantage of the pricing structure and grace periods to grab a few ad hits, and then let any domains that aren't raking in the profits drop again. If you changed the rules today, you'd probably undermine most of the abusers within a couple of weeks.

Re:Make em expensive again

[thomas_of_needham]

I recently let a domain of mine lapse due to apathy on my part. A domain grabber picked it up and converted it to some dumb links and I wished them luck with my former no-hit ssite and domain. The annoying thing is I cannot get in touch with them to get them to take my name off the contact part of whois. All contacts e-mail and phone go nowhere. If I were going to change things I would make domain holders visable. Just my $.02 . Thomas of Needham

Re:Make em expensive again

[RpiMatty]

When looking for a new site, the first place I go now is Google. I wanted to visit the website for Dick's Sporting Goods. I always refer to this store as Dick's. When I typed in dicks.com I did not get to the correct site.

Re:Make em expensive again

[FireFury03]

National domains were politically expedient, but a stupid idea.

I wouldn't say the idea was stupid, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For example, a small business that only the UK could happily have a .co.uk - this is no problem since it's only people in the UK who are interested in visiting the web site and it would give international visitors a clue that they probably shouldn't expect that business to trade internationally. Having a name collision with a small business in another country wouldn't really be an issue since the other business would be under their own country code. Businesses that trade internationally can have a .com as well as their own country code. I'd say this is a good thing since the domain name gives you an indication of the geographic region the business is interested in trading in.

However, there are some problems with this approach that immediately spring to mind:
1. The US would have to be convinced to make use of the .us TLD.
2. Some companies always seem to want to look bigger than they really are, so you'd still end up with them inappropriately registering a .com. (This seems strange to me since personally I would much prefer to do business with a small company since they usually treat their customers better).
3. You'd end up with people snapping up the .com name of any company that looks like it might get big enough to trade internationally, and then charging that company through the nose for it.

Of course, every so often some more TLDs are introduced. For the most part I don't think they do anything but bring in more money for the registrars since companies have a habit of just snapping up their domain name under as many TLDs as possible to avoid confusion with any other organisation/domain squatter.

How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it?

I'm not in the US, but I have had a number: sucs.swan.ac.uk, theankh.demon.co.uk, f213.n2503.z2.fidonet.org... Although I stopped considering myself "young folk" a while ago :)

Re:Make em expensive again

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you actually paying $10/month for your domain? That's absurd! It should be $9-$10 per YEAR! Maybe you meant hosting...

Re:Make em expensive again

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Actually the US Air Force uses multiple dots in the majority of their e-mail address. The US military in general does a decent job of useing the heirarchal nature of DNS.

EG. John.Doe@AFSPC.af.mil
        John.Doe@Peterson.af.mil

And I have seen much longer address for mobile units.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Actually, I do RTFA]

!'s are wildcards?

Re:Make em expensive again

[CorSci81]

Problem with the corporation idea is you severely hurt legitimate small businesses then. A good number of small businesses are incorporated, but definitely don't have the cash to pony up $1000 for a website to help them grow and expand their business. I've been amazed how much web traffic we've had for my family's brewery, but there's no way we could've afforded a domain for the business at $1000 when we were getting set up.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Reziac]

Routing separators, IIRC.

Re:Make em expensive again

[jacquesm]

I don't think that would work, in fact it would make life easier for squatters. For them a $100 up front that they get back is just a cost of business, it means that whoever they intend to sell the domain to will be forced to pay up at least $100 more. For everybody else it is a barrier to entry, and for the smallest (private individuals) that may be too much.

Re:Make em expensive again

[ehrichweiss]

"The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name."

A way around this would be to start your own registrar, like some of the turnkey systems that godaddy, etc. offer for all of $90/year but I suspect that's what some of the squatters have started doing already.

Re:Make em expensive again

[DynamiteNeon]

It's already a bit confusing.

audiauto.com is a ppc site, but audicom.com appears to be a valid one. Domain names are already oftentimes misleading unless you have some other information (like from Google) to help you sort them out.

I do agree with you though that adding more TLDs won't necessarily fix the problem since there will still be ppc sites taking advantage of the confusion and misspellings. In my opinion, the only real way to deal with the problem is to make them illegal. We have laws (in America, at least) against various forms of fraud and things like Pyramid or Ponzi schemes, so why should this be any different? They're creating sites that are intentionally designed to mislead.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Rick Bentley]

I had a similar experience with a domain I used to have "algebraic.com". I wasn't using it much so I let is lapse. I saw that some tool registered it, so I recently sent him an e-mail mentioning that I had it once and wondered how much he wanted for it.

... He said "I'd take $10,000". Dick.

What needs to change

[FredFredrickson]

What needs to change is getting your domain back if you accidentally let it expire.

Just days after I accidentally let one of my domains expire with godaddy, they told me it's in a probation period where it was protected and only I could re-register it if it was a mistake- the catch was that it'd cost $80, as opposed to the $10 it normally costs.

That price is arbitrary, as it's no skin off their backs to re-register it for standard cost. They're banking on drop-catching. Drop-catchers snatch domains faster than I've been able to, even using godaddy's service that watches and grabs a domain the minute it expires.

Re:What needs to change

[grapeape]

Early on when I was broke and just starting out I thought domains should be cheaper now that they are I wish they were at least more than an impulse purchase. Drop Catching has turned into nothing more than legalized extortion. I was similarly stung by godaddy...it wasnt a url that anyone else would likely want so I decided not to play that game and let it go.

Re:What needs to change

[CastrTroy]

Maybe you should switch to a different registrar if you forget to renew your domain. My registrar sends me email notices 2 months before mine expires, then again at 1 month, then a couple more times after that. They make it really hard to forget. Also, if you don't remember to renew it, maybe it wasn't worth that much to begin with.

Re:What needs to change

[D'Sphitz]

About 6 years ago there was a domain I found that was a month or so from expiring. I checked it every day and it wasn't ever renewed, it entered a hold period and presumably was going to be released to the public after n days (30 i think).

As the date approached I wrote a script to check the domain availability every 30 seconds, and alert me via email, phone, and loud annoying .wav file as soon as it became available. That never happened, it never officially became publicly available.

I emailed the new owner and his response was simply "$4000.00". It has now been parked for over 6 years rather than being used for a legitimate purpose.

I didn't know how the domain name business worked back then, but I learned then how sleazy it really is. These people are in bed with the registrars, and an individual who just wants a domain name less than 40 letters long is SOL.

Re:What needs to change

[Marc_Hawke]

My registrar let me put the thing on 'auto-renewal.' Is that unusual? They just charge me once a year, and if I wanted it gone, I'd have to tell them to make it gone.

Re:What needs to change

[vux984]

My registrar sends me email notices 2 months before mine expires, then again at 1 month, then a couple more times after that. They make it really hard to forget.

Actually, so does goddady. I get all kinds of reminders from them. They also have auto-renewal options.

I suppose the only way to blow it would be to have your contact address some spam catcher address you never check. But that's not godaddy's fault.

Re:What needs to change

[macshit]

Which registrars are good, BTW (for reasonably low cost "individual" service)? Seems like the only comment I ever hear about domain registrars is of the "Scum-sucking hell-parasite! Damn you, damn you forever!" variety...

Re:What needs to change

[Ksevio]

But then what about the domain squatter that lets the domain expire, then tries to get it back after you register it? That sounds like a whole new loophole for them.

Re:What needs to change

[Anonymous Coward]

Godaddy does the same thing. I had a domain with them that I don't want any more and it just expired recently. I got many warnings in the months leading up to it and even up to the very day it expired I got an email saying "warning, expiring TODAY!!" There's no way somebody using Godaddy can bitch about forgetting to renew their domain. Come to think of it, I have another domain that doesn't expire until late March and I've already received 3 reminders from Godaddy...

Re:What needs to change

[nprz]

My registrar automatically put my on the 'auto-renewal' and refused to take me off of it. I had cancelled my account with them and they were still trying to charge me for their 'auto-renewal' of my domain. That is the last time I pick a registrar because it is cheap.

Re:What needs to change

[Yez70]

Your post gave me an idea. Domains are 'property' in a sense and they have a value. Let's charge 'property taxes' on them. If a domain has a market value, it has a taxable value. It could generate some nice tax revenue for states, or countries. It could also spur some pricing wars with domains other than .com and .net as different countries charge different tax rates. The majority of people own domains worth $10 or less, so it would cost them at most $1 a year per domain. Anyone who owns more than 100 domains would have to pay an incrementally higher rate per domain. It's just an idea, I'm sure a politician would love it.

Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain, every year. I bet he'd drop the price, or the domain pretty quick.

Re:What needs to change

[DMUTPeregrine]

I no longer own a website, but when I did Fuitadnet.com seemed good for me. Their auto-renewal was effective, it just billed me once a year for the domain name.

Re:What needs to change

[Deltaspectre]

I personally recommend Namecheap (namecheap.com), as I haven't had any difficulties with them yet (and free WhoisGuard :) )

Re:What needs to change

[kidphoton]

That is totally unfair! I'm a reseller for godaddy and I just checked. They're charging $80 to save some nimrod who can't keep his shit together, and I don't get a piece of it? You Bastards!

As to the original topic, won't this recent change in ICANN policy largely eliminate the problems with drop catching? Tasting is the real problem and where most of the accidentally dropped names get caught up in the wash, at least if it's not a valuable generic domain name. If you let a generic name drop, take it as a lesson in the value of domain names.

Re:What needs to change

[phalse phace]

I didn't know AOL was also a registrar.

Re:What needs to change

[TheLink]

I used Gandi before, they seemed decent to me.

I think their T&C states clearly that in their opinion YOU own the domain name.

Whereas many registrars appear to say that THEY own the domain name and you get to use it as long as you pay.

What's the difference? The difference is how you are treated when the domain name expires or when stuff happens. Those registrars typically start squatting on names you let expire or letting "Partners" a first go at squatting on it,

The other plus is Gandi is based in France. The sue-happy people/companies are usually in USA. Just more fun if say the **AA try to send threatening letters to Gandi, for stuff that is legal in France and my country. While I'm not in France, Gandi have been around for years and so far I don't see signs that any of their _customers_ has needed to sue them yet.

But I don't think they're going to do very much handholding for you, so you should know about what you are doing technically.

Re:What needs to change

[hankwang]

Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain

Normally, real estate is not valued on what the seller asks, but rather on the price for which comparable property actually is sold.

Re:What needs to change

[Chapter80]

We just had an incident where our customer decided they didn't want a certain domain name, so they let it expire. Then they changed their mind, to keep it for one more year, just in case they found a use for it.

The tech guy renewed it, and told us it was $200. As he described it, the domain was in its second grace period (meaning that it got picked up by a bottom-feeder), and that was the charge. I doubt that the customer realized that he was making a $200 decision, when he said "oh what the heck, let's keep it for one more year" on a domain name that they never used for anything meaningful.

I have seen some strange stuff in the domain name business. I was shocked when one small manufacturer bought a relatively obscure dot com domain for $5000 from a squatter - that was the day I raised my prices to them!

Re:What needs to change

[dodobh]

So who collects the taxes (Which country)?

Re:What needs to change

[Von Helmet]

I'm not aware of any taxes on property that you're holding... Is this a purely hypothetical thing or are their actual taxes on just possessing things on that side of the pond?

Re:What needs to change

[Mr. Slippery]

I used Gandi before, they seemed decent to me.

Seconded. I've used Gandi for years for several domains and had no trouble.

I think their T&C states clearly that in their opinion YOU own the domain name. Whereas many registrars appear to say that THEY own the domain name and you get to use it as long as you pay.

That's exactly why I picked 'em.

Re:What needs to change

[Todd Knarr]

So far I've had good luck with Dotster. Everything I've had to do I've been able to do through their Web interface, including requesting and entering transfer authorization codes. No problems renewing domains through them. They offer domain parking, but it seems more a sideline than a main part of their business.

Re:What needs to change

[blanks]

You expect them to hold your domain after you let it expire?

No only do they email you a few times about your domain to expire. As well as give you a warning about expired domains when you log into your account, but you can also even set your account to re-register domains names about to expire! There is simply no reason to complain about losing a dommain name when godaddy does everything to let you know about a domain name expiring short of sending you a physical email or phone call.

Re:What needs to change

[rhinokitty]

This message sponsored by GoDaddy.

Re:What needs to change

[MooseTick]

"Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain, every year. I bet he'd drop the price, or the domain pretty quick."

What if I wanted a domain you owned? I could send you an offer for $100000 for the domain that I never intended to pay. Then I could send it to the "Internet tax office" and you would either have to pay a lot of $$, dump the domain, or go through the gyrations of selling it to me and me putting off paying.

Re:What needs to change

[flathead_iv]

The tax is on "real property", which is land.

Re:What needs to change

[doctorfaustus]

As to the original topic, won't this recent change in ICANN policy largely eliminate the problems with drop catching

I don't think the policy has actually changed. The change appears to be proposed, but the registrars (who make money off drop tasting) must approve the change. Don't hold your breath.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is looking to effectively end domain tasting with a proposal to start charging the annual ICANN fee on registrar domain registrations.

Domain tasting is the use of the Add Grace Period to test the profitability of a domain name registration. The AGP is a five-day period following the initial registration of a domain name when the registration may be deleted and a credit can be issued to a registrar.

"Domain tasting has been an issue for the Internet community and ICANN is offering this proposal as a way to stop tasting," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO. "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."

AGP was originally introduced by registries so registrars could avoid costs if a domain name was mistyped or misspelled during the registration process. It is part of the .com, .net, .org, .info, .name, .pro, and .biz registry contracts.

Tasting has been a serious challenge for the Internet community and has grown exponentially since 2004. In January 2007 the top 10 domain tasters accounted for 95% of all deleted .com and .net domain names -- or 45,450,897 domain names out of 47,824,131 total deletes.

The proposal will be part of the ICANN budget process for the fiscal year starting 1 July 2008. The early draft version of that budget will be released for and discussed at ICANN's New Delhi meeting later this month. After public discussions of this proposal and other budget issues, the proposed budget will be released for addition discussions by 17 May 2008 and be voted on at the board meeting to be held during the ICANN meeting in Paris in June. ICANN accredited registrars representing two-thirds of fees collected will be asked to approve the proposal.
 
 

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-29jan08.htm

Re:What needs to change

[oborseth]

Chances are the domain you let expire went into the redemption grace period. This is a registry imposed period, NOT registrar, that a domain goes into after deletion if it is past the five day free grace period. It's a 45 day period where only the original registrant is allowed to get the name back. It costs a registrar $60 to get a domain out of the grace period and not the same price as a standard registration. It's also usually a manual process where a service rep has to log into the registry's site and perform the redemption operation.

Re:What needs to change

[Von Helmet]

So you can be taxed just for owning land? I can understand being taxed on selling land, or earning rental income from land, but just for owning it seems a bit odd.

Re:What needs to change

[flathead_iv]

Yes. The taxes are used to fund infrastrucure like sewer systems, parks, and schools in the area. Local things that only an owner of a property in the area (or renter, the taxes get passed on as a relative increase in rent) would use.

Not all states have a property tax, some just have an higher income tax. There are problems and benefits with both systems, but generally the taxpayer pays about the same amount in each.

Re:What needs to change

[Von Helmet]

Ah, OK, that makes sense. I think I can draw a parallel now. It sounds like our council tax.

Re:What needs to change

[hal9000(jr)]

godaddy starts sending reminders 4 months out. then one every month or so. Plus you can set to auto-renew. You must keep your email address current, however, to receive the emails.

Remarkably, bluehost.com also sent me a reminder 60 days out when my main domain name, which is NOT registered with them, was going to expire. I am one happy bluehost customer for just those little details.

Point is, if you keep your contact info current, there is no reason to let a domain lapse unless you want it to.

Re:What needs to change

[Anonymous Coward]

These people are in bed with the registrars, and an individual who just wants a domain name less than 40 letters long is SOL.

So, do pray explain exactly how I managed to register a five-letter domain name just a few weeks ago? It's not a random string of letters, either, but a common word (albeit in a foreign language).

Re:What needs to change

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxes are a great idea! I was just thinking how uncomfortable it is having two nickels to rub together. Never can have enough hands in my pockets!

Question: legality?

[muphin]

is it legal to just mass register domains and use them for profiteering? i've wanted to buy some domains to use but when i go to check to see if its available all i see are those search scams

Re:Question: legality?

[ContractualObligatio]

Is it legal to just mass buy buildings and use them for profiteering?

Yes. Property speculation is an old business. But the prices are rather more than a few bucks for a property, and property rights do not suddenly expire. It's a very different situation, so your point isn't clear.

I agree that something like zoning laws would be great if the correct formulation is possible, but I don't see how raising the price above the easy profits threshold stops the normal guy. There were plenty of vanity registrations before the fees came down to the level they're at now. The advantage of a reasonable fee is that you don't have to worry about loopholes and freedom. What if someone wants a domain, it's been illegally parked, and it ends up costing them more than $100 to free up the domain, for instance? It's difficult to say that either approach (fees vs. zoning) is superior.

Re:Question: legality?

[Warbothong]

"Is it legal to just mass buy buildings and use them for profiteering?"

It's called renting.

Re:Question: legality?

[petermgreen]

There is very little unclaimed real property in desirable areas and property rights don't generally just expire in the same way domain names do.

Imagine if a simple accident could transfer your valuable real estate into a pool where anyone could buy it at far below it's real value. That is what the situation is like with domain names.

Re:Question: legality?

[illumin8]

Perhaps the IRL zoning laws could be implemented to buying domains, in that it wouldn't be allowed to just set up a page full of ads and keywords and no content at all.

You want to start policing the internet and letting someone like ICANN decide what content is appropriate and what content isn't?

Good luck with that!

They got my .org

[$pace6host]

I won't post the name here (no need to generate any traffic for the new owner), but I had a .org and it got snapped up right after I accidentally let it lapse. I blame myself (the credit card on file went past its expiration, and I didn't read the emails until it was too late), but it's still annoying. C'est la vie. The worst part about it is coming up with a new name. I didn't have any investment in the old name beyond the trouble of telling all my friends what the address was. Maybe when they fail to see $$$ rolling in, they'll let it lapse themselves, but I imagine another drop-catcher will pick it up. Maybe I can feel happy knowing that I can bleed drop-catchers a few dollars a year.

Re:They got my .org

[TheRaven64]

A year, to within a few hours, after I registered my .org domain someone registered the .com version. I discovered this when a friend asked me 'why are you running a porn site' and I discovered she'd typed .com instead of .org.

More than the drop catching

[ContractualObligatio]

It's an interesting study, although it seems you safely ignore drop catching. Things have to become available at some point, so it's what happens after the "drop catch" that's important. As the paper itself concludes:

"Drop-catching alone is not what has led to this problematic environment, but rather it is the abuse of the Add Grace Period in connection with drop-catching that appears to be the cause."

Gotta say domain tasting and parking spoil the internet for me. I've been thinking about setting up a website, and most of the names I checked were domain parked. I could easily live with the registration fee going up significantly if it meant that only people with a real use for domain bought it. The paper suggests that $100 (which isn't too much) is about the cutoff point where it starts to become financially stupid.

Re:More than the drop catching

[sssssss27]

And perhaps setting aside a TLD for personal websites that would have a cheap fee and punishing anyone who used them for anything else.

My dad set up a server for our family, immediate and extended, that we all use for e-mail, to share pictures or videos, and anything else that you would want a server for. It would suck to have to add an extra $100 to the server costs.

Re:More than the drop catching

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and they could call it .name.

Re:More than the drop catching

[Marc_Hawke]

I'm paying $10/year.

Are you suggesting that I pay $100/year, or $100 registration fee, and then $10/year 'upkeep' fee?

The former would price me out of the market (personal vanity domain), the latter I could probably deal with.

Re:More than the drop catching

[ContractualObligatio]

Good question. I would say the latter, on the assumption going a year without knowing whether an "investment" is going to pay off is a sufficient deterrent to abuse.

That wouldn't address existing parked domains, though. Maybe in addition to the pricing change there could be a mechanism whereby you can apply to have a parked domain treated as "available" for the purposes of someone wanting to register a new site i.e. you get to transfer it against their will for $100. For the "parker" to reclaim the site would take $100 which would defeat the purpose of trying to make an easy profit from a few clicks. If you're a company that genuinely wants to reserve the name, then fine - use it properly, re-direct it to your main site, or simply have a blank page.

I don't dislike domain parking as such. It's the scenario where you have an idea, and find every variation you can think of has been taken by an automated thesaurus that I hate. I reckon it's worth finding a way to prevent it, though I'm not sure exactly how.

Re:More than the drop catching

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a .name domain. That's what .name is for.

Re:More than the drop catching

[SgtChaireBourne]

"Drop-catching alone is not what has led to this problematic environment, but rather it is the abuse of the Add Grace Period in connection with drop-catching that appears to be the cause." That is actually a serious problem. Given that many ISPs, such as gisol, will retroactively change contract conditions and even assume full ownership of your domain name. Others will simply take your domain when you first register it. Normally, one option would be to let the domain expire and then grab it up, but these scum won't let the domain expire, but instead let one of the bottom feeders grab it before it becomes available to the original owner.

Re:More than the drop catching

[houghi]

That could become costly for many people who just have fun with the website.
Many of those people will be willing to put adds on their sites, where they do not so now.

Re:More than the drop catching

[Reziac]

But that takes it back to the situation we used to have, where only profitable businesses and rich people could afford domains.

I don't think the solution is raising prices, unless the object is to lock out anyone who lacks money to burn. But I do think "domain tasting" needs to go away. Where else do you get to test-drive a product, sometimes over and over ad infinitum, until you've sucked all the potential profit out of it??

Use Fees for Property Rights

[Baldrson]

There should be no taxes -- only use fees for net property rights (with an exemption for one's subsistence assets up to, say $500k).

If the use fee were the short term treasury rate (also known as the risk free interest rate in modern portfolio theory), then it would not distort the market. Indeed, it would terminate abuses of property rights such as we see with domain grabbing, spectrum hoarding and last but not least, Microsoft.

Better yet, instead of disbursing it via political processes so far removed from the people no one but professional parasites can influence it, take the use fees and evenly divide them throughout the population to give everyone a uniform incentive to uphold enforcement of property rights starting, of course, with the sovereignty of a nation whose state is so wisely crafted.

Re:Use Fees for Property Rights

[Anonymous Coward]

huh?

Re:Use Fees for Property Rights

[ContractualObligatio]

It's difficult to see what you're proposing here. What would your "use fee" be a percentage of? And what are the market distortions you refer to?

Re:Use Fees for Property Rights

[Baldrson]

What would your "use fee" be a percentage of?

What bankers call "liquidation value in place". Essentially, the use fee would be the risk free rate of return on the no-brainer value of the property as defined by bankers looking for loan collateral.

Market distortions basically occur when the government departs from the ideal anarcho capitalist system where everything is market driven, including force. Economists like to talk about it in different terms -- such as "no deadweight loss" due to "perfect inelasticity" but such perfection never really exists.

Re:Use Fees for Property Rights

[ContractualObligatio]

You're scoring high on the bullshit meter here.

Why liquidation value? The site owner is not under duress, or acting as loan collateral. Why not market value or book value?

Putting that aside, the no-brainer value of a business is normally calculated through discounted cash flows. The discount rate already takes the risk-free rate into account. To then attempt to re-apply the risk-free rate is simply sloppy thinking. It's almost as if you think we should treat an intangible asset as physical equipment that might be sold for its intrinsic value, or some other misunderstanding of finance.

Further, the value of the site would remain significantly greater than the cost to acquire it. This would hold true using other standard valuation methods such as a quick-but-effective multiple of revenues. Your proposal would have absolutely no effect on domain parking. If your mechanism does not address the issue at hand, what is its purpose? Is it simply another tax?

Could you perhaps construct an argument rather than string together parrot-like repetition of definitions you've read somewhere?

Re:Use Fees for Property Rights

[Baldrson]

You're scoring pretty high on the obtuseness meter here.

You can't put aside the choice of valuation of the property while discussing the interest rate to apply as the use fee. The two are linked by the net present value calculation, as you yourself pointed out!

The function of government is to protect property rights, beyond those subsistence assets an individual would self-defend (home, tools, small territory/farm/hunting land) in "the state of nature" (perhaps you're more comfortable with Lockean terminology than "anarcho capitalism"). A precondition of government is that all property rights are under some sort of "duress": The threat of "taking" by force or fraud. This is the basis for using liquidation rather than market value. Moreover, since land is the most targeted asset for taking (even more than gold) it makes sense that the "in place" valuation be used since the taker would prefer their synergistic value.

Now as to the interest rate: When banks use the net present value calculation to estimate the value of collateral -- assets which they "take" upon breach of contract -- is by thinking about the profit stream they, as naive owners, would be virtually certain to obtain by taking control of the asset. Since they are naive, they must not use the profit stream expected from knowledgeable owners, but rather by virtually any competent adult. It is in that sense that I mean "no brainer". So they project their "no brainer" profit stream upon which they need to run a net present value calculation, which means they need to pick an interest rate. They pick the interest rate that corresponds to being able to turn that asset into cash over the short term and sock it away somewhere over the short term until they can loan it out more intelligently: the risk free interest rate of modern portfolio theory aka short term treasury rate.

Now, you might ask, why does the government "take" all this "no brainer" profit from non-subsistence property rights to protect those property rights and then redistribute them to everyone evenly in a citizen's dividends? Simple: That's how you turn the systemic incentive for taking into a systemic incentive for upholding those non-subsistence property rights without removing the incentive for knowledgeable ownership. That's what I mean by "non distorting".

Could you perhaps try thinking before insulting those with whom you are attempting "communication" oh thou PSEUDONYMOUS one?

Mine, too

[Dr. Manhattan]

But fortunately it was on dyndns.com and they pulled the stolen one for TOS violations. Now I have the same name, but in .net instead of .org. Nobody cared about it, anyway, but it was a major annoyance personally.

Tasting may be on the way out

[gujo-odori]

At a recent ICANN meeting, it was voted that ICANN will cease to refund the ICANN domain fee. The result of that will be that registrars won't refund it either, which in turn is expected to be a bullet to the heart of domain tasting.

ICANN's fee is not a lot - 20 cents (US) per year - but that is expected to be sufficient to make domain tasting unprofitable.

Article here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/81299_domain_tasting_ends/

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ContractualObligatio]

Agreed. Still need to do something about parking though.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[bepo]

Would we really want to do anything about it? Who decides what is appropriate for a website and what isn't? This could be a good intentions project that quickly gets hijacked into Internet censorship.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ContractualObligatio]

Yes, some of us really do. ICANN currently holds that power. At the time when fees were higher, the Internet was held up as a vision of free speech - is there some difference in in free speech principles between a $10 fee and $100 fee that I'm missing?

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[rhizome]

At the time when fees were higher, the Internet was held up as a vision of free speech

Not to rain on your prelapsarian parade, but in the days when domain fees were higher there were a lot of other restrictions that obviated domain parking.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[Nemilar]

Yes... a $90 difference, to be precise.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[gujo-odori]

I'm not convinced that domain parking is that much of a problem, though. Tasting is a problem because it's widely abused by spammers, and is also abused by parkers as a means of finding out which domains are good for parking. If the economic model of tasting is broken, parkers will have to pay their money and take their chances like everybody else.

The two groups that seems to be mainly bothered by parking are:

-People who wish they could register that domain. To that, I can't say much but "The parker got their first, and unless you can establish some kind of fraud (phishing, etc.,), the first person to register is the one who has the right to a domain."

-People who want the advertising dollars the parkers are getting. To them, I'd say "Build a site with content people want to look at, and you'll get those dollars."

Parked domains are really pretty invisible to me, both in my work and in my personal use of the Internet. The only time I run across them is sometimes when investigating spam, since there is some overlap between parkers and spammers. It's not all that large, though. A smart spammer will not spam links to a parked domain, lets it be nuked and stop producing income.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ContractualObligatio]

That's not a counterpoint to my post, it's a supporting argument!

I'm not saying things were much better back in the day before some great Fall where domain parking ruined the world, or whatever metaphor you had in mind when you made your pretentious prelapsarian comment. I was pointing out that if we have freedom of speech now with a $10 fee (as the GP implies) and we had freedom of speech back then with much higher fees (as I can attest), there is no reason to fear the impact of a minor rise in fees.

Pointing out that there were "a lot of other restrictions" back then simply supports my case that we don't have to worry about censorship just from a $100 fee.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[el33thack3r]

Parent said: ICANN's fee is not a lot - 20 cents (US) per year - but that is expected to be sufficient to make domain tasting unprofitable.

But the article is entirely at odds with this assessment, and I agree:

If the GNSO council were to recommend making ICANN's $0.20 fee non-refundable, the measure may not be enough. Not only would it fail to eliminate the practice completely, but there would be pressure by the constituencies within ICANN to give the new change time and thus it could ultimately slow down the process of bringing about positive change.

The article suggests a "restocking" fee when a name changes hands, as well as a threshold limit to the number of drops and adds a registrar can make (to avoid domain kiting). These are smart, targeted fixes to a huge problem, namely, most good names are taken, yet there is little of value. In fact, the article claims that a handful of "domainers" are squatting on the vast majority of names.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[Psychochild]

There's also, you know, the people affected by the "drop-catching" described in the article? (Yeah, I know, it's Slashdot... who reads the fucking article?)

Due to a lack of action from the person with whom I previously had one of my domain names registered, it went unregistered and some domain parker is now squatting on it. Not much I can do, unfortunately, besides spend over a thousand dollars to try a trademark dispute resolution. It sucks in this case because the squatter is basically profiting off of my work with the domain. Luckily, however, it was the .com name when I mostly use the .org as the URL for people. However, the domain name my better half registered is gone, and it put an end to her business because of it. (Not that she invested that much in the small business, but it sucks to lose even a small amount of personal investment.)

Now, I don't think that big business should be able to go strong-arm someone into giving back a domain, but what domain squatters do is disruptive to a lot of people who do participate on the internet. They profit off of people who visit a site the expect to be something else, and off of people who have spent time building an audience for the URL.

But, life goes on and you learn to use more reputable domain registrars.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ThreeGigs]

To that, I can't say much but "The parker got their first, and unless you can establish some kind of fraud (phishing, etc.,), the first person to register is the one who has the right to a domain." Actually, the first to _trademark_ the name has the right to it. So if you really, really, really want that domain back, spend the $550 to trademark the name, then apply for arbitration.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ContractualObligatio]

Wow. I didn't think anyone could be so shallow as to equate the principles of free speech to "$100 - $10 = $90". But hey, at least you can do basic arithmetic.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ContractualObligatio]

I agree, it's not much of a problem, simply a preference. I don't see the downside to a system whereby a domain name must have a genuine use, which no more or less arbitrary has first come, first served. I prefer the option that supports someone with an idea to create something, rather than to merely profit without any creation of something at all. But I doubt there is a strong economic argument.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[petermgreen]

There's also, you know, the people affected by the "drop-catching" described in the article?
I agree, there was a domain I was "given" and started to use quite extensively but it was never actually registered to me and was registered with quite an expensive register. When it came up for renewal we naievely thought that the easiest thing to do was to let it drop and re-register it under my name. Since then it has been passing round the squatters. I would really like it back both because I like the name and because I gave a lot of people my email address there.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[petermgreen]

the problem I see with that system is who gets to decide what is and isn't a genuine use.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with parking. The web is not the internet. My domain has a parked website, because I'm using it for e-mail. What gives you the right to complain?

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[ShakaUVM]

20 cents a year is not enough, they need to drop tasting completely.

You can write to their RFC person here:
domain-tasting-2008@icann.org

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[gujo-odori]

Precisely. I have a vanity domain, have held it for years, and there is nothing there but a single email address. I have never hosted a website or any other service on it, and there are doubtless some who would say that's not a legitimate use because I don't have a website there and have no intention of ever putting one there.

As for me, while I'm not really a fan of domain parking (although I'm neither an opponent), I couldn't really argue that my entirely non-monetized use of my domain is more legitimate than someone parking a domain and scraping a little advertising revenue from it. I'd probably even do that myself, except A) I'm too lazy B) My domain likely wouldn't attract much traffic except from those interested in a fish in the char family, indigenous to cool, clear mountain streams in Japan and AFAIK found nowhere else in the world, and C) I don't really want to be seen as a domain parker; there's more than a little overlap between domain parkers and spammers (speaking as a member of the anti-spam industry, thus having a front-row seat to that stuff).

In fact, a domain with no web site is regarded as highly suspicious in some circles, so there are doubtless many people who would mistake my domain as belong to a spammer at first glance.

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[gujo-odori]

Not everything is trademarkable. I hold the .org version of my domain name. Other people hold the .net and .com versions, and we all do different things with them. I don't even run a website on mine; the others do, and in a different language than mine. In cases like this, whoever got there first, got there first.

One can also make a pretty good case that being the first to trademark something doesn't mean you should have a right to the domain name:

http://www.nissan.com/Digest/The_Story.php

Nissan (which was, of course, known as Datsun outside of Japan at the time Uzi Nissan opened his computer shop), tried to screw him royally and pretty much succeeded until they got to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This case has a lot to do with I have never bought a Nissan and likely never will.

Reg other names similar to yours

[kcbanner]

I had to reg a domain, two words with a dash separating them. I also registered the name without the dash and have it domain forward to the main domain. This way if the site becomes popular, I won't have to worry about a parker stealing my thunder.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This is not bad at all

[kylehase]

Why are people complaining about this. Most registrars send out several email warnings prior to an expiration almost to the point where it's annoying. Secondly, if a domain is that important to you shouldn't you be using the registrars auto renewal service?

It's not like they're frontrunning (sniping) domain names.

Re:This is not bad at all

[FreeGamer]

There are different circumstances to take into account.

I work on an open source project Vexi. When we chose the name, we registered vexi.org and life was good for 2 years. Towards the end of the 2 years, the person who registered the domain name became difficult to contact and the domain expired. Some cyber squatting scum picked it up automatically and we had no chance to re-register it ourselves. Now the only recourse to get our domain back is to launch some kind of legal challenge, which we have neither the time nor resources to do plus we don't have a presence in the US where the offending squatter is.

In our case, the domain expiring was required, but we were not savvy enough to retain the domain and now it's in misuse.

Re:This is not bad at all

[wolfperson1]

It's not always that simple. A lot of first-timers register through their hosting companies. Some of these companies make it damn near impossible to keep your domain name if you change hosts. I know at least two people who have been forced to let their domains expire in order to switch to cheaper, better hosts. The results? One got lucky and managed to get their domain back. The others found their domains registered by some company who did nothing but fill it with ads and ask for money with poor English.

Had it worse

[RealGrouchy]

I've had it even worse. We thought we had renewed, but the place we had "renewed" our domain with wasn't an actual registrar; they just took our money.

Then, when we paid someone we *thought* was a real registrar, it turns out they were another scammer.

Meanwhile, some Malaysian jerks bought up our domain, and were incommunicado. They weren't even holding it for ransom or anything, just stuck some porn/spam stuff on there and collecting the ad revenue.

We eventually recovered the money from the first two spammers, but as for the domain, we ended up having to re-brand and change our domain from .com to .ca

- RG>

Re:Had it worse

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? You got tricked by the same scam twice? Even once was insanely dumb, since it implies you did zero research before selecting a registrar.

stupid is as stupid does?

[NemoinSpace]

meh How important is your domain to you if you let it expire? There are whole industries out in the real world that absolutely count on people being too lazy or too stupid to to keep up. People that can't handle the technology should stay the hell away from it. Of course it's always easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for your own (in)action.

Re:stupid is as stupid does?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will you still keep that beautiful Zen perspective of yours when you leave a window open one day and someone steals all your stuff?

Re:stupid is as stupid does?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

There are whole industries out in the real world that absolutely count on people being too lazy or too stupid to to keep up. People that can't handle the [SEE BELOW] should stay the hell away from it. Of course it's always easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for your own (in)action.

Yes, and typically we use government intervention to deal with those industries.

drop-catching is a gateway drug?

[vinn01]

"drop-catching is the first step to more serious abuses such as domain tasting, domain kiting and typo-squatting. "

The article lost all credibility after that brain dead pronouncement. It belongs with such great thinking as...

"first shoplifting then murder"
"first pot then heroin"

I smell something fishy going on

[TheLink]

But it's not stealing in this case. The domains have expired.

The domain tasting BS has to go. And it looks like it's on its way out.

The bulk of domain spam squatting problem is because the ICANN and many registrars have been doing dubious/stupid stuff in the past.

BUT, now someone is appears to be saying "let's fix the problem by giving the registrars more money per domain".

Amazing. Rewarding people for doing something bad/evil.

Bad idea

[TheLink]

I disagree.

The whole problem was the domain speculators hardly ever had to pay for the domains they parked on in the first place with the Domain Tasting and other stupidity that the ICANN allowed (or planned?). Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?

Now to fix the problem THEY caused, you are suggesting that we PAY THEM MORE?

I bet if the domain tasting idiocy is really gone for good, this crap will drop to a manageable level in a few years.

It's really fishy that people are conveniently suggesting this, just after a dubious source of revenue stream is drying up for the registrars.

Re:Bad idea

[suresk]

The more I think through the concept of domain testing and look at the statistics (wow!), the more I think you are probably right - getting rid of this available tactic will help a great deal.

Domain names (useful ones, at least) are a fairly finite resource, though, and it seems inefficient to require a fee to own the right to them that is so low that people will still speculate and squat at a fairly high rate. Yeah, tasting will reduce this by quite a bit, but you only need to make $10 or so per year for holding a domain name to be profitable, which means there will still be a ton of squatting and speculating. I see no other way to at least mitigate this problem than upping the fee a bit (like, say $25 - $50/year, nothing outrageous) so that squatting and speculation become less profitable.

All I want is the ability to register a .com that is at least somewhat useful and relevant to the topic of my site. As it is now, that is very hard to do (unless you like lots of dashes in your domain name, are good at making up catchy words, or are in a very niche market), and it kills me because the vast majority of names I want to use are used for ppc landing pages and nothing actually useful. If upping the fee isn't the answer, what is?

Re:Bad idea

[TheLink]

I suggest it would be best if we wait and see if doing away with the tasting stuff fixes things enough.

Sure it's only 10/year, but if you are required to pay for the duds, it starts to get expensive.

Previously they didn't have to pay for the duds at all - so no surprise if many made enough money just from "tasting", parking and getting some money from ads.

If someone is good at knowing which names are worth it and has to actually pay for speculating, I think it's fair.

In my opinion the name isn't that important. Many of the big names aren't even in the usual dictionaries e.g. Google, Skype, ebay. Stop thinking that you have to register something similar to the topic of your site. Your site may change topic too, so then it'll be a misnomer. Come up with a brand name that doesn't appear on Google yet.

Most of the time when I hit a "domain parking site" it's not because of the name they use. It's just because it shows up on Google when I search for something else - they link spammed Google or something.

If they picked an already trademarked name then they get lots of hits, but I think there are already laws and rules that deal with that scenario.

Re:Bad idea

[ShakaUVM]

>>Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?

Domain kiting is even worse -- imagine the government says that you can move into a house free of charge for a week without a deposit or fee. Then you get evicted, but you move back in -- you can permanently live in the house without ever paying rent.

IMO, domain tasting was the stupidest fucking idea ICANN ever came up with. Or, sorry, SUPPORTING THE IDEA OF DOMAIN TESTING. Which should have been painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain that it was a terrible idea, as the entire point of it was for people who were speculating on domains, not actually using them.

Let's see:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-10aug07.htm
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-29jan08.htm

Yep, about 10.5 years for them to come to this conclusion. Lord, I love committees.

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

And now people are talking about higher fees.

Guess who the higher fees will go to?

Re:Bad idea

[ShakaUVM]

Unless ICANN is changing their fee from 20 cents to 100 bucks, the registrars will get the increased fees, who are as corrupt as any business I've seen. More so, since their antics are sponsored by ICANN.

If they made it $100 bucks for a 3 year registration, that would shut down most of of the domain speculation (though big-ticket names would naturally still be reserved). Domain tasting / kiting is just absurd, and even more absurd that ICANN actually put together a focus group to explore and explicitly allow it.

This article saved my domain

[donutello]

I had registered my domain with an email address that is no longer valid and a physical address where I no longer live. I had forgotten all about renewing it until I saw this article. Turns out my domain expires on Feb 7th and I was able to renew it (and update my contact information) in time!

I recently lost mine

[JazzXP]

My case wasn't a lack of renewal, mine was that my registrar let my domain slip off the books (had the previous year too), and went MIA when I tried to contact them about it for renewal (obviously was an automated program to accept CC details then re-register it). So there was no way I could transfer it to a new host before it was deleted. I planned on re-registering it the day it was deleted, but then saw one of these bottom feeders pick it up the day it was removed (when I tried to re-register it).

Remove them from search engines

[Powerdog]

There are two variables here: cost and revenue. People are suggesting raising costs, but I haven't seen many people focusing on reducing revenue.

When a domain is dropped, Google and the rest should pull the records from their search engines. Or derank them, or something equally damaging. Once the ad revenue starts drying up, this stupid business model will end. Or instead of deranking, pull any AdSense ads on sites that were just dropped and that don't meet certain quality/traffic standards.

I can imagine it might cause some problems for people who accidentally allow their domains to lapse. But that seems like a very small price for the rest of us to pay.

Re:Remove them from search engines

[Ant P.]

Maybe in addition to deleting the search engine ranking of sites when they get dropped, they could ban adsense on sites below a certain pagerank regardless of age. That'd kill two problems - bottom-feeding scum like this and long-term squatting sites that do nothing but waste space.

If anything, it might make all the one-reader me-too blogs clogging up the internet go away.

the biggest offender may surprise you

[ILuvRamen]

Guess who the biggest offender is? WEB HOSTS! I lost my old domain because I had my old domain host use their registrar. And guess what happened when I didn't renew with they cuz they sucked? They re-registered it "for my convenience" and sat on. I had to go to .net instead! That should be soooooo illegal under monopoly/anticompetition laws.

Re:the biggest offender may surprise you

[Todd Knarr]

And you've now learned a few valuable lessons about domains:

1. Make sure your name and address are listed as the registrant for the domain. Never ever accept someone else registering the domain for you, no matter how much you trust them. Also make sure you're listed as the billing and administrative contact.
2. Always, always, always enable domain locking. Set your domain so it can only be transferred by you getting an authorization code and providing it to the new registrar. Combined with the first item this makes it as hard as possible for someone else to take control of your domain without you knowingly giving it to them.
3. Don't register your domain through your Web host, register it through a regular registrar. If your Web host's going to run DNS for you you can make them the technical contact and just set your domain's NS records up with the nameserver information they give you, but keep the registration separate. That way you can move hosts without having to worry about domain registration issues.
4. If you absolutely insist on registering your domain through a Web host, make sure you transfer the registration elsewhere before cancelling your hosting contract or letting it expire.

Re:the biggest offender may surprise you

[Blakey Rat]

I lost my old domain because I had my old domain host use their registrar. And guess what happened when I didn't renew with they cuz they sucked? They re-registered it "for my convenience" and sat on. I had to go to .net instead! That should be soooooo illegal under monopoly/anticompetition laws.

Let me get this straight,

1) You registered a domain name through a web hosting company.
2) You didn't renew the domain name
3) You didn't transfer the domain name to a different registrar (not that it's really relevant in this case, since if you didn't renew in step 2 all bets are off.)
4) The web hosting company then re-registered the domain name

And this should be illegal... how? The critical step you're missing there is 2: if you didn't renew the name, you sent a message to the world saying "hey world! I don't want this domain name! Go for it!"

You're not allowed to complain if someone else takes it after you say you don't want it. The fact that it was the same web hosting company that registered it is irrelevant in this case, they're acting the same as every other registrar would in this situation.

Next time, if your host sucks, just transfer the domain name to another registrar and then cancel your account.

The real problem is phony "registrars"

[Animats]

Most of the "ICANN accredited registrars" are fronts for domain tasting. There are only a few real registrars; the rest are dummies for picking up dropped domains. Enom has a huge number of dummy fronts - "Enom1, Inc" through "Enom469, Inc".

One step needed is for ICANN to enforce the provision of the registrar agreement which allows ICANN to prohibit registrars from owning or speculating in domains. And the provision which requires that a registrar have assurance of payment before activating a domain. With that, the end of the "grace period", and Google refusing to monetize domains for the first five days, we should see this problem decrease. The .org TLD recently got rid of their grace period, and domain transactions dropped 90%.

We're working on this from the browser end. The general idea of our SiteTruth system is to filter out the bottom-feeders. It's the next step after ad-blocking - make the link pages, directory pages, typosquatters, and similar junk far less visible.

It's not even clear that advertisers benefit from all those junk pages. If you advertise with Google ads, and get clicks from junk pages, do they really result in sales? Or is this just a way to take money from the real advertiser and divert it to some bottom-feeder?

Re:The real problem is phony "registrars"

[hankwang]

enforce the provision of the registrar agreement which allows ICANN to prohibit registrars from owning or speculating in domains.

Does that provision really already exist? It would be very hard to prove, though, because one could set up a registrar that does the registrations on behalf "of their customers", and ICANN is not really in the position to trace whether those customers are the same organisation as the registrar.

Re:The real problem is phony "registrars"

[mspohr]

I don't know how you judge junk and 'bottom feeders' but I just checked about five sites that I know are legitimate and they all came up as red and yellow... you may need to refine your methods.

Re:The real problem is phony "registrars"

[Animats]

Does that provision really already exist?

Yes. Paragraph 3.7.9 of the registrar agreement: "Registrar shall abide by any ICANN adopted specifications or policies prohibiting or restricting warehousing of or speculation in domain names by registrars."

Sounds like politics

[Evets]

It sounds like politics to me. Just when ICANN is entertaining proposals to get rid of refundable registrations we get two domain spam articles on the front page. Odd, nothing about this problem before though it has existed for years.

Personally, I don't think it's an ICANN issue to get rid of domain spammers. Like any good capitalist, I think the market should take care of itself. Major advertisers should shun the money from Domain Parking - much like Google did in the past. Smaller companies should press to get the option to NOT display their ads on parked domains. Consumers should do like I do and immediately close a parked adspam page as soon as I accidentally hit it.

The more difficult it is to make money from random domains, the less people will want to enter and remain in the market space. If you're looking for someone to blame, look directly at the big boy - Google:

1) Their ranking system for quite some time encouraged people to run as many domains as possible. The more crappy micro-sites and parked domains that pointed to your pages with keyword anchors, the higher your results.
2) Pagerank. How many sites exist on the net for the sole purpose of pagerank.
3) Adsense. They came up with the main monetization model for domain parking spam and webspam in general.

Google has made sweeping changes in the past to get rid of spam and sometimes they have worked to great effect. To actually make sweeping changes to get rid of domain spam they would have to attack their own revenue model - a revenue model that accounts for at least 80% of google's income, and this isn't something the stockholders will see as a good thing unless there is a clear path to long term gains as a result. So really, Google has brought us spam and while they do have the power to take it away they won't do it in the short term. It's interesting, though - the dichotomy of the whole thing. Google is one of the companies that made the web as powerful as it is. And they are also one of the companies that made it as crappy as it could be.

Re:Sounds like politics

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Personally, I don't think it's an ICANN issue to get rid of domain spammers. Like any good capitalist, I think the market should take care of itself. Major advertisers should shun the money from Domain Parking - much like Google did in the past. Smaller companies should press to get the option to NOT display their ads on parked domains. Consumers should do like I do and immediately close a parked adspam page as soon as I accidentally hit it.

And like any good realist, I don't blindly trust the free-market, it having failed so often in the past. Right now, given the incredibly low (non-existant) cost of combining domain tasting and parking an ad site, it's almost impossible to lose money on. Since ICANN monopolistically sets the prices, it is ideally solved by a ICANN acting as a unary actor.

The Question Is, How Do They Know...

[Nom du Keyboard]

And how do these people know when a domain has expired back into the available pool? Do they track whois records which list expiry dates, get the listfrom registrars, are registrars themselves, or what?

Re:The Question Is, How Do They Know...

[RKThoadan]

I believe you are on to the real way to take care of drop-catchers. Simply don't publicize all the domains that expire. It's been a while since I've looked into the details, but I'm pretty sure plenty of registrars will provide a list of all domains about to expire and possibly even list domains that have just expired. If you simply outlaw the publication of expired or about to expire domains that would largely take care of the problem. You might need to take an extra step and not even include expiration information in whois information. The registrars would fight this though, they get most of their money from the drop-catchers.

Re:The Question Is, How Do They Know...

[russotto]

The drop catchers aren't getting their names from public lists. They are in bed with (or identical to) the registrars, so the registrars simply turn the name over to the drop-catcher the instant it expires.

Re:The Question Is, How Do They Know...

[blanks]

This is a silly misconception that many people have.

There are are entire websites that make money off of tracking domainss about to expire.

Here is what the sites do
Create a database of domains
Lookup links to/from that site (backlinks = good)
Track PR (Page Rank) of the site
When the site is about to expire.

Then when the domains start to expire in the database they either buy them up, or offer them up to members who pay the monthly fee to get the domain lists each day.

No one should take that as a recommendation.

[Futurepower(R)]

Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names

Re:No one should take that as a recommendation.

[vux984]

Re:No one should take that as a recommendation.

Indeed. Then again if you want to host some throwaway site for your friends and family or some non-profit or club or whatever, or you want to squat on a dozen typo-squat domains to redirect them to your main page, while preventing real typosquatters from grabbing them godaddy is just fine.

But no I wouldn't trust a million dollar business site to godaddy.

Godaddy's not right for everyone, but its perfectly fine for a lot of applications.

And as for the site you linked. Pretty much everyone has horror stories with every 'mega-discount-or-free-super-host-that-does-all-business-and-support-via-their-website'.

google 'gmail horror stories' or 'facebook horror stories' or 'Wild West Domains horror stories' or ebay, paypal, hotmail, adsense, ... etc...etc...etc.

They pretty much all suck at customer service.

Re:No one should take that as a recommendation.

[CastrTroy]

Well, if you google Dreamhost horror stories, most of the stuff you'll find is actually recommending people to dreamhost after they've had some horror story with another hosting company. Sure they have some problems, like their recent accidental billings, but I've been pretty happy with their service over all. For the price you pay, you definitely get way better service than you'd expect.

Re:No one should take that as a recommendation.

[tit0.c]

My website hosted at Dreamhost has been down like 35% of the time since last week.
Dreamhost oversells their servers like no other hosting company around I think.

Re:No one should take that as a recommendation.

[Anonymous Coward]

My website hosted at Dreamhost has been down like 35% of the time since last week.
Dreamhost oversells their servers like no other hosting company around I think.

This is and isn't true. It's true that Dreamhost oversells; they're honest about that and if you google for "dreamhost overselling" you'll find their blog posts where they disclose exactly why and how much they oversell and why it's not the big deal people make it out to be. It's not true that this is responsible for outages; again, if you read the aforementioned blog posts they explain exactly why they had massive outage problems last year (inadequate power supply, not overselling), and they've explained recent outages too (badly configured routers or some such, I forget)...

The point being that while they're not the world's best hosts, and definitely not a good choice if uptime is a major criterion for you, they are pretty up-front about the way their company is run, and while their hosting has been patchy at times, the problems are not caused by overselling.

Simple

[BlueParrot]

$100 to register, Free to renew for the first 10 years. $10 to renew every year after that. That way it works out to $10 per year for those who stay with a domain, and there is a big incentive not to register a domain you do not wish to keep. In combination with trademark law that would probably take the sting out of most of this nonsense.

Re:Simple

[bvimo]

A very good idea.

No Easy Solutions

[Stanislav_J]

I agree that this is a huge problem, but I don't think pricing domain names out of the range of po' people (like me) and putting more money in the pockets of the registrars is a valid solution. The only theoretical solution I can think of is to limit the number of domains you can register at one time, or better yet within a certain time frame. But even that is flawed. Retailers do this all the time by limiting the amount of a certain sale item you can buy -- if widgets are normally $20 each, and they are put on sale for $10, they don't want one person buying all their stock out at once to resell them somewhere, and piss off the rest of the store's customers in the process, being accused of "bait and switch" when all the stock disappears in the first moments of the sale. But there are ways to ameliorate that limitation: go around to different branches of the same store and buy the limit, go back to the same store several times, use confederates to each buy up to the limit, etc. Likewise, any limitations on domain purchases could be undermined by using multiple dummy corporate names, going to a bunch of different registrars, etc. It makes the process more difficult, and not as successful, but wouldn't dampen the enthusiasm of ardent speculators.

What about laws?

[grumbel]

We have trademark laws, we have copyright laws, we have laws that deal with telemarketing, why not have laws that deal with domain grabbing?

Re:What about laws?

[stone2020]

Trademark laws apply to domains. You can get it back if you have your site trademarked. I'm tired of hearing people complain about losing their domains. You get reminder emails to renew it. You have no excuses unless you mess up. If you can't afford to renew then you lose it. Its just like a house. If you foreclose on your house, do you expect nobody else to buy it and if somebody does buy it, do you complain that its not fair?

Re:What about laws?

[Blakey Rat]

If you didn't bother to renew the domain, you didn't really want it that bad, right? What exactly would a law change in this area?

If I give away a coffeemaker to goodwill, then decide a week later that I want it back, should there be a law saying I can get it back? That's ridiculous.

multiple dots?

[alizard]

boo!tweekco!alizard@pacbell.com . . . or alizard%tweekco%boo@pacbell.com . Or even pacbell.com!boo!tweekco!alizard

I managed to miss out on :: in my e-mail address.

For younger people around here, that's what addresses looked like in the early 1990s. A "smarthost" with a path to a user address. This was in the days before there were commercial ISPs everywhere. Connecting to another e-mail address back then was occasionally an adventure.

Re:multiple dots?

[SL Baur]

I'll provide a translation here, since it seems not everyone is up to speed on older email technology.

I managed to miss out on :: in my e-mail address. Decnet ... the horror, the horror.

My first company email address used those, but they did not route mail outside of the cluster.

boo!tweekco!alizard@pacbell.com . . . or alizard%tweekco%boo@pacbell.com . Or even pacbell.com!boo!tweekco!alizard Mixed UUCP and domain routing with a relay. Yes, once upon a time it was a friendly act to provide an open mail relay.

Once upon a time I hacked sendmail (and sendmail.cf without any support tools) into System V/R2 on a system one UUCP hop off the internet and had to deal with all those forms. That's the kind of thing that's a whole lot more fun saying you did than actually doing it.

Ah, memories ...

Set a maximum price for selling a domain

[nulldaemon]

I find most domains are taken up by squatters whose main aim is to resell it at 1000% profit. In the meantime, they post up google adds for some added revenue... I think we should cap domain costs at something like $20per year. If someones caught trying to sell it for more, simply take it away from them. Take away the profits for just squatting on domain names and maybe the rest of us who actually want to use a name for a business or something legitimate, will have something we can register.

GoDaddy's web pages difficult to navigate: ads.

[Futurepower(R)]

GoDaddy is far, far worse than you say, I think. For example, GoDaddy tries to exploit the ignorance of most people who buy from them by offering many, many services of poor value. That makes GoDaddy's web pages difficult to navigate because they are so cluttered with ads.

I wasn't talking about them hosting a web site. I was recommending not even buying a domain name through GoDaddy.

NameCheap. ICANN has made a mess of management.

[Futurepower(R)]

I did a lot of research and decided NameCheap was the best.

However, I got the impression that they planned to charge for WhoisGuard later.

The entire domain business is badly managed. ICANN has made a mess of management, and has allowed many semi-crooked businesses to make messes, too.

Re:NameCheap. ICANN has made a mess of management.

[Deltaspectre]

I'm sure they do, but first you get a free (year?) of it.

Alternative TLD's generally don't work

[hal9000(jr)]

At least in the US, when was the last time you went to a TLD that WASN'T a .com, .net, .edu, or .gov?

Alternative TLD's are great in theory, but the .com TLD is so well branded that it has 'stuck'. Users think everything is a .com. How often have you heard on TV or radio mentioning a TLD other than a .com? Um, never, perhaps?

If alternative TLD's are going to have any uptake, at least in the US, I think a few things need to happen. First, there needs to be some regulation on who can apply for a .com, .name, etc. That way there is some control and differentiation between a business and some other site. Second, there needs to be a marketing campaign to change the way the public views domains. I think it would be great to have a domain name tld like .per for personal sites, but who is going to use it? So if you're looking for cousin joebob, you would think first joebob.per and if you are looking for joebobs hardware, you would think of joebob.com. Third, if #1 and #2 could be acheived, you need to migrate domains to the proper TLD and that will cause a world of hurt. Can you see trying to explain to cousin Joe Bob who knocked up a Drupal site using Fantastico how to 1) change the domain names and then 2) set-up redirects from the old name to the new?

Think about the idea before you cast it off as some simple solution.

Re:Alternative TLD's generally don't work

[flink]

At least in the US, when was the last time you went to a TLD that WASN'T a .com, .net, .edu, or .gov?

Not very long. :P

Move your meat, lose your seat.

[mcmonkey]

And guess what happened when I didn't renew with they cuz they sucked?

You didn't renew because they sucked? That makes no sense. Sounds like you didn't renew because you suck. If you wanted to keep the domain, you could transfer it to a different registrar.

Unless you are claiming the registar hid the renewal date from you? Seriously. If there are any domain registrars out there they do not offer a reminder email when the registration is about to expire, the option to auto-renew, the option for long term (5 and 10 year) registrations...well, then it's really your fault for not picking one of the many registrars that offer these tools to help you not lose your domain.

Come on. Before, the domain wasn't important enough to you for you to keep tabs on the registration. But now, it's your life's work? Please!

Front-running and squating are one thing, but this thread is just full of Gen X whine.

Besides, what do you mean you went to .net instead? So you're an ISP or networking company? Then you have even less of an excuse for letting your domain registration expire!

Re:Move your meat, lose your seat.

[ILuvRamen]

my web host ipowerweb registered my domain name through OnlineNIC under their own company's contact info, in my name. I couldn't do anything with the domain cuz technically they owned it cuz it was their account. If I sent a request for domain transfer, they'd receive and ignore it without even asking me. Trust me, I talked to their support. They do that. There's no way to transfer to domain cuz they'll always say no to the request notification. And I transferred to a new host because my old one had about 75% uptime on FTP connections and 90% uptime for the rest of the site and forget e-mail. I could connect to the e-mail part of the server maybe once a week if I was lucky. THEY SUCKED. So the moral of the story is, always use an outside registrar for your domain to ensure you have control over it

Why not a datebase for Pay for Click Sites

[hubs99]

I have a quick solution. Why not create a list of websites via a submission button in the web browser that would further limit people form going to a site that has been identified as a pay for click site? This could work much like the P2P blocking programs such as PeerGuardian which may already do this and I don't even know.

My family name had this happen.

[Anonymous Freak]

I own the .org and .info domains of my last name. A distant cousin owned the .com. He let it lapse, and it was picked up by a domain squatter instantly. They want over 500 Euro for the domain. Which is silly, since my last name is so uncommon, there are only 40-ish people in the WORLD with my last name. None of us are famous, none of us own a business with our family name in it. (There are a few of us who own businesses, but none with our name in it.)

I've waited three years for the name to expire, but they keep re-registering it. I've told them outright that I'm willing to pay $35, and that's it. By my measure, they'll hit that mark in their own spending next year.

Re:My family name had this happen.

[Reziac]

But if the domain is squatted BY a registrar -- it costs them effectively NOTHING.

That's why I think registrars should be prohibited from holding any domains they don't actually use in their immediate business. If someone is found using a shell corp to squat domains -- yank their registrar status.

And from the long list of "accredited" registrars, it's become clear that any bozo can now set up in the business, and ICANN accredidation means NOTHING.

Help me raise money, I really need it!

[Anonymous Coward]

cachim-bar.com
cachim-bar.net
cachim-bar.org
cachim-bar.info
cachimbar.com
cachimbar.net
cachimbar.org
cachimbar.info

For sale.

What's wrong with CANADA?

[Anonymous Coward]

hum... CADNA, sorry, wrong post...

other incentives

[gfody]

What about them drop-catching your domain and then selling it back to you for a price. I was late renewing my domain, gfody.com years ago and it was immediately picked up by these bottom feeders. Their scam is completely automated so I could never get a hold of anybody but I could make an offer to buy it back. I want my domain back but I won't pay them out of principle.

Me too :(

[Wavesonics]

This JUST happened to me with a stupid little domain I hosted at site at for a few my friends. I didn't have the $ to renew it right away because I'm in college and all. And that DAY it was snatched up :( R.I.P. pusquoteboard.com

SiteTruth

[PRMan]

It's interesting that you mark my completely legitimate, registered business completely with minus signs. I hope you get that fixed in the beta.