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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."
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.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Why not make it $100 to register, and then $5 a year to renew.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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/
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.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not like they're frontrunning (sniping) domain names.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
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.
"This message was sent from an Apple
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.
Make it a $100 deposit refundable in 6 months.
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.
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.
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).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
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!
Mmmm.. Donuts
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.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
The Domain Registry of America never fails to send me a letter telling me to renew with them.
Even though I'm in Australia.
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.
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be
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.
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?
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
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.
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names
$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.
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.
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
We have trademark laws, we have copyright laws, we have laws that deal with telemarketing, why not have laws that deal with domain grabbing?
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
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.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.