ICANN Takes a Step Toward Ending Domain Tasting

An anonymous reader writes "For years, domain squatters have exploited an ICANN loophole: whenever a domain name is registered, ICANN collects a 20-cent fee from the registrar. To allow for non-paying customers, the registrar can return it five days later for a full refund. The loophole has let unscrupulous registrars constantly create and refund domain-squatting websites, selling 'what you need when you need it' advertising. The problem has grown so bad that every month the world's top three domain squatters, all located in Miami with the same address and represented by the same lawyer, recycle 11 million domain names. After years of complaints, ICANN has finally begun moving on the problem. On April 17 ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization voted to make the ICANN 20-cent fee non-refundable. If the ICANN board ratifies this position in June, those top three squatters will be getting a monthly bill for $2.2M. News of the ICANN changes has been applauded by legitimate Internet businesses, tired of having to choose nonsense names because all the good ones have been squatted. ICANN has published an analysis of the economics of ending domain squatting."

Comments

Higher.

[mingot]

Make it a buck.

Re:Higher.

[tattood]

Make it a buck.
If they do that, that will end up raising the price of the domain registration. The (legitimate) registrars would not want to have to pay for the cost of this in the event of a normal user/company returning a domain, so they are going to tack that onto the price of all domain registrations. They will likely add the 20 cents on anyway.

Re:Higher.

[mingot]

I'm cool with that.

very cool with it, in fact.

Re:Higher.

[Obfuscant]

The (legitimate) registrars would not want to have to pay for the cost of this in the event of a normal user/company returning a domain,

Why would the registrar be paying this charge when someone returns a domain? It should be the registree who pays this. If you register a domain, part of the contract will be ".20c is nonrefundable" or "$1 is nonrefundable" or whatever.

The cost of a real registration should not go up to cover those who borrow them.

Re:Higher.

[Tuoqui]

Make it 5 bucks, people legitimately registering a domain would not be affected and registrars would end up ending domain tasting in its entirety.

All the registrars are gonna do is go 'Ok, $5 non-refundable if you cancel this domain' or something to that effect.

Re:Higher.

[SatanicPuppy]

I'd rather the price be higher. Domains are cheap, and cheap leads to massive amounts of squatting. If you really need 100 personal domain names, then you shouldn't object to paying for them.

Re:Higher.

[Uncle Focker]

No, they just have a clause that says that $1 of the fee you pay to the registrar is nonrefundable. No need to price things higher at all.

Re:Higher.

[Dog-Cow]

This is simply not true. If the fee was raised to $5, the cost to registrees would go up at least $4.80. Remember, the $0.20 currently goes to ICANN, not the registrars. If the costs to the registrars goes up, the cost to the registrees will go up as well.

Re:Higher.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the poster means the register cant refund the last $5. ICANN would still be paid only $0.20 the $4.80 would be in the pocket of the register.

Re:Higher.

[Anonymous Coward]

$0.20 for the 1st domain
$0.40 for the 2nd domain
$0.80 for the 3rd domain
$1.60 for the 4th domain
$3.20 for the 5th domain
$6.40 for the 6th domain
$12.80 for the 7th domain

I think you might see the pattern here. As people get more domains they get more costly. Make it cap at something like $100 or $200 per domain per year.

That'll stop every idiot out there that thinks they need to register more than a couple of domains for any one purpose.

Re:Higher.

[thogard]

How do you know how many domains someone has? My server is hosting about 75 domains but only a few of them are mine and those all appear to be registered to different groups yet I'm the tech contact for all the rest.

Remember when .eu was started up, there were people who set up several registrars who each had lots of companies claiming ownership to some domains and in the case of sex.eu there were about 200 different ones that improperly claimed a trademark so in the end it was given to a random one of the 20 people who where honest said "I want it but have no real claim".

Re:Higher.

[Khaed]

So domain names would be $0.80 higher than they are now to compensate for the difference. Not exactly a big difference. I have more than that in change on my desk right now. Even with the twenty cents included, it's a dollar a year. Whoopee. I could register a dozen domains and all I'd have to do is buy one less pizza that year to make up for the difference. It's only going to really impact people registering a lot of domains.

Like domain squatters.

Re:Higher.

[Anonymous Coward]

Make it 5 bucks, and $4.80 of that to go toward a bounty on the heads of spammers. I'm all for killing two birds with one stone. In a manner of speaking.

Re:Higher.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately people don't (won't) understand the difference between cybersquatter and domain investor/developer or the difference between tasting and kiting.

IMO there is nothing wrong with tasting. Does it hurt anybody if you take a 5-day cooling off period to consider your purchase ?
However *kiting* (the process of repeatedly registering and dropping domains) is clearly abusive and should be stopped.

The moves by Icann will effectively discourage kiting, however they will do little to stop TM squatting.

The cybersquatters are those who register names with trademark issue to make a buck on it. I don't register trademarks or typo names.

Let's make it clear: legitimate domainers are not cybersquatters. Let's not tarnish everyone with the same brush.

Re:Higher.

[nobaloney]

They will likely add the 20 cents on anyway.

GoDaddy already has.

http://www.godaddy.com/

then click on the Check out our low prices near the bottom.

Re:Higher.

[LangDaLa]

If they do that, that will end up raising the price of the domain registration. The (legitimate) registrars would not want to have to pay for the cost of this in the event of a normal user/company returning a domain, so they are going to tack that onto the price of all domain registrations. They will likely add the 20 cents on anyway. It's just part of the cost of doing business. If you are registering a legit name for a real company then you're not going to want to return it anyway. Most companies waste so much money on other stupid things, it's doubtful they would even notice $.80

Response time?

[Boa Constrictor]

About time really. Shows how efficient an effective monopoly can be too.

Re:Response time?

[Herby Sagues]

And all those sites (well, 95% anyway) are financed by Google, another monopoly.

Three squatters...

[oahazmatt]

So if this goes through, will these three squatters be forced to bend over?

Re:Three squatters...

[mike9989]

Too soon!

This could create a worse problem

[davidwr]

Now those squatters and domain registrars will work together to keep those domains locked up for good. If the domain registrars themselves are the ones registering the domains, their true cost will be a lot less than $6/year, especially if 90% of the domains resolve to the same IP address/web ad parking page.

I mean, how much does it cost for Registrar A and its affiliate company B to register 1M domain-names and point them all to the same IP address? Not $6M/year.

Re:This could create a worse problem

[tattood]

The goal is to stop the squatters from registering and then abandoning the domains that dont generate revenue. When they register the domains, they point them all to the same ad-filled page on their website. At the end of the "trial" period, if the domain has not generated enough revenue to justify keeping the domain, then they return the domain. The ones that do generate ad revenue, they keep and leave up the ads.

Re:This could create a worse problem

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

No the registrars themselves have to pay ~ $6 a year/per name to the registry ( verisign ) for the domains they themselves purchase. So yes, it does cost anyone other than verisign at least 6 million to register 1 Million names.

Re:This could create a worse problem

[eln]

Forcing non-refundable fees would kill the profit margins because these guys would then have to pay for domains that aren't generating any revenue for them. As it is now, they can register thousands of domains essentially for free and get rid of the ones that don't make any money.

I think it's a good plan, but I think the 20 cents is too low. There should be a 1 or even 5 or 10 dollar fee that's non-refundable, and the total cost of a domain should be higher than it is. That would help eliminate domain tasting as well as eliminate domain squatting, wherein legitimate users have to pay inflated prices for domains anyway because squatters are holding them hostage.

Re:This could create a worse problem

[colesw]

Well to become a accredited registrar you have to pay the following:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/accreditation-financials.htm

• US$2,500 non-refundable application fee, to be submitted with application.

• US$4,000 yearly accreditation fee due upon approval and each year thereafter.

• Variable fee (quarterly) billed once you begin registering domain names or the first full quarter following your accreditation approval, whichever occurs first. This fee represents a portion of ICANN's operating costs and, because it is divided among all registrars, the amount varies from quarter to quarter. Recently this fee has ranged from US$1,200 to S$2,000 per quarter.

• Transaction-based gTLD fee (quarterly). This fee is a flat fee (currently $0.20) charged for each new registration, renewal or transfer. This fee can be billed by the registrar separately on its invoice to the registrant, but is paid by the registrar to ICANN.

So yeah you pay $4000 per year, and then $4800-8000 a year in operating fees, then $0.20 per domain name, or $200,000 for 1 Million domain names.
Oh and also you need to prove $70,000 in assets and have $500,000 in insurance.

Re:This could create a worse problem

[mabhatter654]

That's cheap for a business. Even a McDonald's requires at least $2M per year to break even.

Considering they charge at least $6 per domain of pure profit versus pay $.20 they pay out (30x more!), it's a very good deal. That way they have money for sexy superbowl ads!

Re:This could create a worse problem

[cgenman]

Others have suggested scaling cost with number of domains owned.

Re:This could create a worse problem

[Reziac]

TFA addresses that:

And so, in answer to the question: how much does it cost to end domain tasting?

The answer is: $1,284 per domain.

The maths was provided to the Board a fortnight ago by Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz. From the minutes: Kurt Pritz indicated that presently ICANN charges a 20-cent fee on every registration that lasts longer than five days (i.e., not a tasted name). Tasted names comprise more than 95% of all registrations, only 1 name in 20 "sticks". Registrars that exclusively taste and do not register "regular" names delete 99.5% of names during the AGP (1 in 200 (0.5%) "stick").

If a 20-cent fee is attached to each of the deleted names for these registrars the apparent price of each name that sticks increases from $6.42 to $6.42 + 0.20 * 199 or $46.22. With the new fee, a name will have to be worth $1,284 in the point-and-click market (as opposed to $6.43*) to be kept. In practice, this will serve to further reduce the percentage of names kept and therefore will increase the apparent price even more.

So... their estimate is that a domain name has to be worth over $1,284 in ad revenue before it's worth keeping.

Which would take a big bite out of the "squat everything in sight" market.

Judge Keeps Google on the Hook for Domain-Tasting

[Anonymous Coward]

How timely. A federal district court just refused to dismiss cybersquatting claims against Google based on its AdSense for Domains program. The plaintiff is accusing Google of "trafficking in" domain names via that program, which allegedly brings Google profits from large-scale domain-tasting activities. As the blog post in the first link reports, Google has recently made some policy changes in response to widespread domain-tasting activities.

the ICANNon has fired!

[Bananatree3]

Gasp! The ICANNon has fired a shot at the domain squatters! That thing has been sitting there for years rusting, I never thought I'd see the day it actually did anything.

Re:the ICANNon has fired!

[hansamurai]

Well, I'm sure they won't mind pocketing the extra dough either.

Re:the ICANNon has fired!

[RealGrouchy]

You mean you haven't seen them fire the ICANNon in the Digital War reenactments? It's quite the thing to watch. The sound of tens of thousands of bubbles bursting leaves you with a feeling of awe.

- RG>

Re:the ICANNon has fired!

[Simon80]

There won't be any extra dough for them to pocket, since the closure of the loophole will eliminate large-scale tasting.

Re:the ICANNon has fired!

[antic]

It is absolutely unbelievable that it has taken so long for action to be taken on this issue. Spineless bitches. There are also thousands of domains composed of random characters used entirely for spamming and the like. They bring no value to the internet whatsoever. Crack down on it immediately.

Tasting should never have been allowed in the first place.

Re:the ICANNon has fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

20c multiplied by every person who wants to open a new site will make cash, I mean I doubt the tasters gave them much cash, not compared to legit consumers anyway.

Bureaucracy much?

[Fenresulven]

So what has ICANN and ICANN's community done in the meantime?

Well, at the Marrakech meeting, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) released a report [pdf] covering the issue, following a request by the owner of the .org registry, PIR, which had been getting annoyed with the practice.

A few months later (September 2006), PIR pushed [pdf] for it to be allowed to charge five cents for .org domains, irrespective of whether they were returned during the Add Grace Period, if the returns accounted for more than 90 percent of domains registered in that month.

The Board approved the measure a month later and the first effort to stamp out domain tasting began. It was, according to PIR, immediately successful in reducing domain tasting.

In the meantime, a series of workshops was held at ICANN meetings covering the issue in increasing depth. The meeting after Marrakech, in São Paulo, Brazil in December 2006, saw a Domain Name Marketplace presentation. And no less than two sessions were held at the Lisbon meeting in March 2007: How the Marketplace for Expiring Names Has Changed; and the Domain name secondary market.

All of this prompted the At Large Advisory Committee to demand an issues report into the issue of domain tasting, which ICANN staff promptly did, producing a report in May 2007, putting it out for public comment, revising it, and then providing a final Issues Report [pdf] to the GNSO Council in June 2007, recommending that a formal policy development process (PDP) be launched.

The GNSO decided to create a Working Group, which produced an Outcomes Report [pdf] four months later in October 2007. That report then led to the GNSO launching a formal policy development process on the issue.

The result of this was an Initial Report [pdf] by staff in January 2008, put out for public comment. That led to a draft Final Report [pdf] the next month (February 2008). In March, the GNSO Council voted to solicit comments on a draft motion that had been prepared by a number of Council members and constituency representatives in an effort to curb domain tasting (a summary/analysis of those comments subsequently pulled back into the process).

In the meantime, the Board had embarked on its own solution, recommending at its January 2008 meeting that all domains be charged the 20 cent transaction fee, regardless of whether it was returned during the Add Grace Period. That proposal would have to go through the budgetary process for the next fiscal year before being enacted.

Is it any wonder it took forever to fix something as simple as domain name sampling?

I quit domain tasting in 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

That's when I first saw goatse and I still have a bad taste in my mouth.

More feel-good decisions, less real action

[damn_registrars]

So it looks like our buddies at ICANN are again ignoring the larger problems that they could take action against, in favor of solving problems that only a small group of people care about.

I would be much more impressed with ICANN if they actually started punishing the registrars that are so blatantly making profit from internet crime. There is a long list of registrars that sell .com domains to spam kings like Kuvayev for him to sell drugs and pirated software. And conveniently enough, many of these registrars will claim to not speak English when you try to ask them about it through their support - even though they provide registration details in clear English. And these same registrars will claim to be located overseas anyways, and hence are not responsible for following US laws.

ICANN has allowed a long list of criminals to make money off the internet. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to a foreign domain registry, but ICANN is turning a blind eye towards the .com and .org registries as well, all in the apparent name of profit.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[lseltzer]

It's bigger than you think. In 2007 a majority of domains registered were for tasting purposes.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[damn_registrars]

It's bigger than you think. In 2007 a majority of domains registered were for tasting purposes.
That may be true, but it doesn't really counter my statement of it being a problem that only a small group of people care about. I would have a very hard time believing that domain tasting has affected anywhere near as many people on the internet as has the spam that has been made possible by complacent registrars and the do-nothing organization known as ICANN.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[iamhigh]

Spam and internet crimes are just that, crimes. Trying to hold ICANN accountable for the registrars, who have to police who they sell to is ridiculous.

I bet they use Dell servers to send out the spam, should we require Dell to ensure that all sales are for legit reasons? What about Western Digital and Best Buy that sell all those hard drives to pedos?

It's a nice thought, but probably impossible, and definately illogical.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[damn_registrars]

Trying to hold ICANN accountable for the registrars, who have to police who they sell to is ridiculous.
Its not a question of ICANN being held responsible for the actions of their customers (the registrars). Its a question of ICANN actually holding registrars to the terms of registrar obligations in the registrar accreditation agreement. In particular, ICANN requires that the registrars maintain valid contact data for their customers, which they seldom do when selling to spammers.

I'm not asking for ICANN to "police" anyone. I'm just asking for them to actually require accredited registrars to meet the registrar obligations that they put forth. Obviously ICANN is not into law enforcement. However, ICANN does have the ability to restrict who can and cannot sell domains within the .com, .org, .net, and several other TLDs.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[thetoadwarrior]

They can take your domain away if you provide false information on your whois which seems more extreme than revoking domains from spammers and criminals if you ask me.

To be honest, criminals probably buy the bulk of the domains being bought so that is probably why they're not that bothered about stopping them.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[Have Blue]

"I'm not going to sell you this domain because I disapprove of the purpose for which you will use it" is a dangerous position to take. What's happening here is just closing a loophole that allows domains to be used for free- a simple, clear problem.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[damn_registrars]

"I'm not going to sell you this domain because I disapprove of the purpose for which you will use it" is a dangerous position to take. What's happening here is just closing a loophole that allows domains to be used for free- a simple, clear problem.
The first problem with your statement is the fact that ICANN does not sell domains. I'm talking about problems with ICANN and how the regulate (or rather fail to regulate) the registrars that they are tasked with the regulation of.

It has nothing to do with whether or not ICANN gives a damn what domains are being used for - they've already shown they don't. It has to do with the fact that ICANN has laid out rules that registrars are supposed to be obliged to follow (see the link I posted previously). Those rules are being totally ignored and ICANN is choosing to take no action.

The only correlation to domain sales is that many of the internet criminals intentionally chose the registrars that are known violators of the ICANN registrar rules. This requires no foresight of potential domain usage by ICANN. I just ask that ICANN actually enforce the rules that they claim to hold registrars to - none of which have anything to do with registrars' customers' illegal activities.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[damn_registrars]

They can take your domain away if you provide false information on your whois
Who can take your domain away?

ICANN won't do it. I can tell you that because I've filled out the bad WHOIS data form for dozens of domains and they've never been taken away by ICANN.

The registrars generally won't do it, either. Hell, they're making money off of the customer whose bad data they submitted. What is the incentive for them to fix it, unless the customer asked them to?

The problem lies with ICANN. They have set rules, but then they don't actually enforce them. There are registrars with demonstrated records of keeping bad WHOIS data - and of course the more prolific internet criminals know who they are. But yet these bad registrars never face any real consequences from ICANN.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[Dun Malg]

I would be much more impressed with ICANN if they actually started punishing the registrars that are so blatantly making profit from internet crime. There is a long list of registrars that sell .com domains to spam kings like Kuvayev for him to sell drugs and pirated software. Asking ICANN to police the legality of online vendors is like asking the Social Security Administration to police credit card fraud because, after all, you can't get a credit card without presenting a social security number, right?

In other words: get a clue, ICANN is neither empowered nor equipped to act in any sort of law enforcement capacity. They're a corporation (that's what the 'C' in ICANN stands for) not a government agency.

Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action

[damn_registrars]

Asking ICANN to police the legality of online vendors
There's no policing in my statement. You placed it there. I am asking that ICANN actually enforce the registrar policies that they state on their own website for registrars seeking accredited status. If you read that, you'll see it has nothing to do with legality or lack thereof. Indeed, it has nothing to do with vendors, either. It is all about the registrars, which is where my beef stands with ICANN. There are plenty of registrars that have attained the accredited status (allowing them to sell in the most popular TLDs), and yet act in blatant violation of the agreement that ICANN claims they are bound to.

In other words: get a clue, ICANN is neither empowered nor equipped to act in any sort of law enforcement capacity
In other words: read my post.

I never asked for them to act in any sort of law enforcement capacity. If you read my posts, you'll see me state several times that I know they are not able to do such a thing. I am just asking that they actually enforce the rules that they state - really the EULA or AUP that they have established for the registrars that they give the accredited status to.

Appropriate tags:

[VeNoM0619]

Appropriate tags:
suddenoutbreakofcommonsense

Re:Appropriate tags:

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up faggot.

Re:Appropriate tags:

[qualidafial]

Appropriate tags: suddenoutbreakofcommonsense How about: suddenoutbreakofpithytags

Hear hear

[jgalun]

This happened to me a few weeks ago. It's a repugnant practice - and I am far from a knee-jerk, anti-corporate person. But just because my friend made the mistake of looking up our domain using NSI, and we needed it in a rush, we were forced to buy it from NSI, even though we could have gotten it for a fraction of the cost somewhere else.

The service that registrars provide is so basic, if someone can charge NSI's prices, it means that there is a market failure.

Re:Hear hear

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what this should stop. NSI is in-effect "tasting" the domain and if they return greater than 10% of their registrations they are stuck with a big price tag..

Think 6$ * how many time you stick it to them :)

Re:Hear hear

[mabhatter654]

exactly, services like NSI's will stop pretty quickly when they have to pay. Just guess lots of names you don't like and let them register away till they've depleted their marketable names to sell to real customers. They would have to register the domains under their shell companies with fake data. THEN ICANN can start cracking down on WhoIS data when they try to hide who's really buying up names. Doing it all at once would break things.

ICANN--not *quite* a bunch of useless cunts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm shocked, shocked.

Don't taste me bro!

[bluestar]

Did anyone else read "ICANN takes a step toward ending domain tasing"?

It has a flavr?

[spun]

That's when I first saw goatse and I still have a bad taste in my mouth. Eeeeew! You aren't supposed to use your mouth on that.

Don't taste me, bro!

[sm62704]

"Is this thing on? Tasting, tasting, 1, 2, 3... SLURP!" -Tommy Smothers, Smothers Brothers LIVE at the Purple Onion

"In a nation-wide taste test, ICAAN's hamburgers were named the best in the country. Tasters said the burger had a certain "je ne sais quoi." In other news, scientists have identified "je ne sais quoi" as a lack of rat feces"
-Misquoted from Alex Fossella

"How does your Domain Taste??" -Digg on domain tasting

"But I don't LIKE spam!" -'Woman' in Monty python skit about the taste of spam.com

"A domain is the place that someone has people who work for them take care of. There's four kinds of domains: Domain of the King, Domain of the [insert name of some kind of Lord of the Rings monster here], Domain of the Public, and Domain of the Name. They have long been sought after by those in positions of power, such as kings or wiki creators. When it comes to domains, it's pretty much like this: in the right hands, everything is peachy. But in the wrong hands, vampires crawl from the bowels of the Earth and feast at our eyeballs." -Uncyclopedia on Domains

"Taste is the Greek god of individual preference. Inbred son of Zeus and Apollo, Taste usually governs endless and pointless debates between retarded entities on internet forums. In sculptures and various other artworks he is depicted wearing a bean flavoured cape and ice-cream shoes, holding a banana-like sceptre." -Uncyclopedia on taste

"Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art." -Oscar Wilde on taste

"Domain tasting is the practice of a domain name registrant using the five-day "grace period" at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second level domain to test the marketability of the domain." - Wikipedia on Domain Tasting

"On the streets these days, a dime bag of kittens costs a pretty penny." - Oscar Wilde on slashdot's Offtopic moderation

Re:Don't taste me, bro!

[cthulu_mt]

You suck.

Squatting = 5 Days???

[iamhigh]

I thought squatting was a little more long term than that. Surely someone has come up with a clever name for it by now... but it certainly isn't squatting.

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[JustCallMeRich]

Imagine if you will, a place where 5 days lasts forever. A week never goes by. A lawn never gets mowed.

Unpossible, you say? Not if you are really a sham company who buys a domain name and returns it 4.9 days later, only to be immediately picked back up again by another sham company which happens to be located in the same place as the first, and again only holds the domain name for another 4.9 days to again return it for a refund and have it immediately picked back up again by a third sham company - a mirror image of the past two, which again holds the domain for 4.9 days, only again to return it for a full refund, at which time the first sham company picks it up again, starting the cycle all over again, ad infinitum - and at $0.00 net cost to the companies.

It's not that squatting = 5 days, but that this process continues for years. Making that $0.20 fee non-refundable means that now every 4.9 days in the above merry-go-round, there is a 20 cent charge for that domain name. What used to be free to do will now cost $1.50 a month - PER DOMAIN NAME if they keep doing this, which, obviously they will not be able to afford.

Chances are they will now have to cough up some hard cash to actually register the million or so domain names they have, or let them expire and be free amongst the intertubes yet again for legitamite buyers to catch.

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[iamhigh]

Thanks for explaining it for me! Seriously.

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[RealGrouchy]

So why is it allowed that three clone companies are allowed to have registrar status?

- RG>

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[wootcat]

That's assuming they keep to their current practices. If they indeed intended to hold onto them "forever", they wouldn't mess with shifting the names from business to business and just buy them outright.

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[JustCallMeRich]

You don't need to be a registrar to buy a domain name, sample it for 4.9 days, and then return it to get your money back. Anybody can do this if their registrar is willing to play ball.

The three sham companies can all register through a fourth sham registrar to make this easier for them. They don't have to be an official registrar, but can do it as a domain reseller. Many big hosting companies have reseller accounts that include some type of domain reseller service. I am doing this now and have never been asked for anything other than money.

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[johannesg]

Your post reads as if it were written for Don Lafontaine ;-) Not that that is a bad thing, of course...

"In a world...

Where 5 days last forever...

A week never goes by...

A lawn never gets mowed..."

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[JustCallMeRich]

Correct. That is how a normal domain sale goes. You buy your name, set up your site.....PROFIT! Or so the theory goes.

But they are in the high profit business of reselling domain names they "own" (in reality they are just tying them up indefinately and not paying anything for them). They may pay nothing for the domain name while they have it in their shell game - but when an offer comes in to buy it, they "buy" the name for, say $6, then transfer it to the person who wants it for their asking price - maybe $600+ as an example. $594 in profit. Not bad.

Nice business model when you can have millions of items 'in stock' that don't cost anything for you until you sell them for a huge profit - and a virtual monopoly on the items you own.

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[JustCallMeRich]

I had more of a Twilight Zone theme in mind, but can hear Don reading that now. :)

Re:Squatting = 5 Days???

[mabhatter654]

you're thinking of people that buy unregistered trademark names like "McDonalds" hoping the company affected will pay up big bucks. ICANN put rules thru several years ago to give domain names to registered trademark owners if they think squatting is going on.

This is great news

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great to see ICANN moving to wipe out one of the internet's top three annoying plagues. The other two being spammers and Verisign.

spam fund?

[ohzero]

Since alot of these 'pump and dump" domains are used for spam, Maybe icann could put any fees collected from known squatters into a national research fund to combat spam via infrastructure and development initiatives. That would be very cool.

Re:spam fund?

[thogard]

Back in the day when they first started charging for domains ($70 for 2 years), a major chunk of that went to fund research from the National Science Foundation however it was declared an "illegal tax".

Doubtful

[Kingrames]

There was news recently that the George W. Bush Library foundation (whatever its real name is, I'm unsure of) was having a great deal of difficulty with domain name squatters who had stolen every possible website they would want to put his library's web page on.

and the worst part: they're all democrats and refuse to sell, and will likely populate those web pages with actual content.

This move is likely an attempt to give them the boot so that the government can steal those websites.

Someone should perhaps forward the word on.

If that backfires it could force all of those squatters to actually put web pages up there for all to see.

Re:Doubtful

[toddestan]

Somehow I doubt that has anything to do with it, since all the Presidential Library sites I'm aware of either reside at a .gov or a .edu domain name, which so far are free of the domain tasting scum. Maybe they are concerned about the .org/.com variants though as I'm sure those are all taken.

Re:Doubtful

[1u3hr]

There was news recently that the George W. Bush Library foundation (whatever its real name is, I'm unsure of) was having a great deal of difficulty with domain name squatters who had stolen every possible website they would want to put his library's web page on.

Sounds like bullshit to me. See Contacting the Presidential Libraries. It lists the addresses of all the presidential libraries. eg:

• Herbert Hoover http://hoover.archives.gov/
• Franklin D. Roosevelt http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/
• Harry S. Truman http://www.trumanlibrary.org/
• Dwight D. Eisenhower http://eisenhower.archives.gov/
• George H Bush http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/

etc...

Most are .edu or .gov, which squatters can't use at all. I guess it's because everyone thinks the have to have a .com. Thus all the presidential candidates have an entirely inappropriate .com site instead of .org for their campaign, for instance. So they can't get "GWBushLibrary.com". Too fucking bad. Get GWBush.archives.gov or a subdomain of whatever institution manages it (probably a .edu).

Judge Keeps Google on the Domain-Tasting Hook

[Speequinox]

A federal district court recently refused to dismiss cybersquatting claims against Google based on its AdSense for Domains program. The plaintiff is accusing Google of "trafficking in" domain names via that program, which allegedly brings Google profits from large-scale domain-tasting activities. As the blog post in the first link reports, Google has recently made some policy changes in response to widespread domain-tasting activities.

So what stops Verisign?

[davidwr]

What stops Verisign from either directly or indirectly getting into the squatting business, other than a desire to avoid bad publicity and maintain its cozy relationship with ICANN?

Re:So what stops Verisign?

[MadnessASAP]

I'm pretty sure that those are 2 very good reasons not to get into the domain squatting business.

Re:So what stops Verisign?

[ahodgson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder

It is simple.

[www.sorehands.com]

No refunds. You have no refunds on software. The web site for purchase usually gives the user a chance to cancel the order before placed. Domains are not so expensive that one should not have to pay for their mistake, especially after having plenty of opportunities to cancel.

Now it is the time to charge for email too

[HaaPoo]

... this way spam may be reduced too, even if they charge .01$ for each email, the spammers have to reduce/stop sending spams.

Re:Now it is the time to charge for email too

[Paperweight]

And credit the money to the person receiving the email?

Re:Now it is the time to charge for email too

[Icarus1919]

Spammers aren't sending the emails; computers taken over by malware are. Thus, under your plan, the spammers will be charged nothing, and hundreds of thousands of users will be f'ed over. You may say forget them, the bill will be a wake up call to clean their computers. While it's true, in an ideal world these people would have installed software to prevent malware, this is not an ideal world and there are people out there who are not at all computer savvy. We shouldn't punish them for that.

Re:Now it is the time to charge for email too

[mabhatter654]

Perhaps things would work better if we did punish people for that?

But in reality, that would never work out. Who decides your computer is secure? All the corporate ISPs running ISA firewall? Does that cut out all Wii, PS3, iphone, etc from getting on their network without a "trusted client". Does that stop a small company from running squirrel mail servers and allow big telco to require all the email be hosted off THEIR servers?

My favorite idea would be to do time sinked emails. Make a connection take 5 seconds to send each mail and allow only one address per attempt. So normal people would be slightly delayed and not even notice. Spammers and hacked machines would slow to a crawl. Hacked machines would get fixed when people complain (but not be broken by the ISP) and spammers would go out of business quickly.

Re:Now it is the time to charge for email too

[Reziac]

And what about large legit mailing lists? There are plenty with over 10,000 recipients, and I've heard of some with over 200,000 recipients. With a delay-per-mail scheme, such large lists could take hours or even DAYS to send.

How is it fair to punish ANY fraction of the legitimate users for the sins of the abusers??

Re:Now it is the time to charge for email too

[mabhatter654]

but how often do they send those lists? Not very often. I'd guess they could ask special permission from their ISP to release the limit, but they'd have to be careful to maintain their machines and not spam or they'd get the block back on. It puts responsibility on each sender/ISP to behave and not just the wild west we have now.

Re:Now it is the time to charge for email too

[Reziac]

Some of the biggest lists are weekly newsletters.

Hell, slashdot has to be among 'em -- how many of the over a million registered users get the daily mailing?? if even 5% do, that's 50,000 per DAY.

And it's the sort of thing that once established, the threshold will creep downward until we DO wind up paying (in some way, maybe not cash) to send each email, even email for personal use.

And I don't like the idea of punishing legit users for the sins of spammers, any more than I like wholesale restrictions from the gov't because there are also idiots in the world. The principle is the same, even if the venue is elsewhere. I'd rather have the freedom and risks of the wild west, than the safety and constriction of 1984, be that in real life or cyberlife.

Too little too late.

[EddyPearson]

This is too little, too late. I gather 95% of domains today are owned by 10 companies.

What we going to do with those Castro guys now?

[Anonymous Coward]

See, the three biggest domain squatters are here in Miami, and they probably are some pathetic fat Cubans, who have no idea how a computer works, and think the U.S. are the land of the opportunities of stay chilling, don't work, and make big bucks from the government.. (The same thing, the 4 million, or so, Cubans living in Florida think...)
Now, without their squatting business, they will have to go back to make thousands of cash-collecting babies, which they just throw on the streets like garbage, so the kids can become criminals and hookers, while their parents take the social services support money...

Will this also stop Networks Solutions abuses?

[martinlp]

I wonder if this will also make Network Solutions think twice about registering a domain every time a whois search is done on their site so that you can not register that domain at any other registrar?

doesn't go far enough

[Eil]

Domain squatters are by far one of the biggest things holding back the Internet. Squatting has gotten so bad that the name of your company has to be complete gibberish in order to match an available domain name. Just try coming up with a company name that has a similar domain name available. You'll find that most of the domains you try either have some sort of spam link portal or a "buy this domain for $200!" page. Only a few are actual web sites. If you don't believe me, try it.

This "domain tasting" thing is a very small problem in comparison.

I think that in order to retain a domain name, you should have to prove that you're using it in an ethical and legal manner. ARIN makes my web hosting company justify their usage of IP addresses, so ICANN should do the same for domain names. Of course, working out exactly how to define a web site that's "using" a domain name versus one that is not might be tricky, but there has got to be a way to curb 90% of the squatting that's going on and take back our Internet from the scammers.

Re:doesn't go far enough

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

What you describe as bigger issues are actually just facets of the domain tasting issue itself.

Re:doesn't go far enough

[thogard]

Australia doesn't have this problem this week. They require that you have a registered business name or some other reason for having the domain name and as a result it has kept the com.au domain name space fairly clean how ever soon they will be changing the rules so they can make more money by allowing the criminals in.

Re:doesn't go far enough

[menace3society]

No, central registry should just put the rates up until it ceases to be profitable for companies to park crap that earn practically no money on squatted domains. They've started doing that with closing this loophole, now they need to do more of the same.

Or at any rate, that's how this shit is supposed to work.

Re:doesn't go far enough

[shentino]

I would like verisign to get on board with it as well, since they are the authoritative delegators for .com's and .net's

Verisign should fine anyone or deny service to anyone who lets X name registrations lapse, barring a retail or reseller agreement.

Again, wrong

[geekoid]

How do you bill for that?
How do you collect?
Who gets the money?

If you can figure that out, and allow people to send 2500 email a month for no charge, it might work.

Of course, spammers will find away around it, like have other peoples computers send the emails.

New domain rush?

[DuckWizard]

I wonder if this will cause a new domain rush, when all these desirable domains are flooded back on to the market (since they will no longer be cost effective for link farmers). Who will snap up potato.com, couch.com, desk.com, etc. when the spammers let go?

Re:New domain rush?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Probably only to a limited extent - after all, domains along those liens are very likely not 'tasted', but registered permanently because of their potential value.

The Little Blue Internet That Could

[Anonymous Coward]

I think ICANN, I think ICANN...

Nifty - Until you do some math

[cyberfunkr]

Let's see: 365 days a year, and they can only hold them for 5 days, so that's 73 times a year to cycle a name (give or take). Let's just round it to 75 because I'm cool like that.

So .20 a cycle at 75 cycles per year means it'll cost a whole $15.00 per year to taste a domain name.

Sure, with 11 million domains to cycle through that makes for a pretty big number. But, Considering that you can sell useful domains for anywhere from $20 to $20,000... They can still keep cycling all they want. Just the less popular names will finally be released in a year when they can't turn a profit.

And if they sell better names for a little more, it can still offset the cheap names so don't expect this to even see a dent for at least one year, but probably closer to three.

Re:Nifty - Until you do some math

[JustCallMeRich]

15 bucks * 11,000,000 domain names = 150,000,000 bucks overhead per year.

150,000,000 bucks / 20,000 bucks = 7,500 high end domain names a year they need to sell to break even. Or about 20 per day. I don't think that is happening.

- versus -

0 bucks for 11,000,000 domain names tasted indefintely = 0 bucks overhead

1 sale per year = PROFIT!

Re:Nifty - Until you do some math

[Wesley Felter]

it'll cost a whole $15.00 per year to taste a domain name. It only costs about $7/year to register a domain outright. But the tasters are making less than $7/year in revenue from each domain, so they can't afford to either register them or continue tasting.

other option

[Fuzzums]

I thought shooting then on sight would be a nice and permanent solution to the problem, but I can live with billing them 2M a month ;)

what worse problem ?

[unity100]

am i wrong or you just defended domain squatting ?

Re:what worse problem ?

[Dun Malg]

You're wrong. I don't see where he defended it in any way.

Re:what worse problem ?

[unity100]

it seems like he portrayed domain squatting or various forms of domain farming as a valid business.

Re:what worse problem ?

[drinkypoo]

it seems like he portrayed domain squatting or various forms of domain farming as a valid business.

Back to school with you!

Forcing non-refundable fees would kill the profit margins because these guys is what he said. He didn't say that was a bad thing; the next paragraph states I think it's a good plan, but I think the 20 cents is too low. There should be a 1 or even 5 or 10 dollar fee that's non-refundable, and the total cost of a domain should be higher than it is. That would help eliminate domain tasting as well as eliminate domain squatting...

He said that the fee should be raised, which should help eliminate both of these unfortunate practices. It's the reverse of how you read it.

Re:what worse problem ?

[unity100]

back to school with me then.

percentages

[unity100]

while serious, spam kings and internet crime is not impacting everyone on the net. however squatting is affecting EVERYone, whether they are startups trying to get a good domain or ordinary people trying to set up a family album site.

Re:percentages

[damn_registrars]

squatting is affecting EVERYone, whether they are startups trying to get a good domain or ordinary people trying to set up a family album site.

I disagree. How many people who are using the internet are looking to purchase a domain name, if they don't already own one? There are plenty of users on the internet who have zero interest in owning a domain name - for that matter there is still a large portion of internet users who wouldn't even know what to do with their own domain name, if it were given to them for free this afternoon.

On the other hand, though, how many email addresses don't receive spam of some sort anymore? The statistics of how much spam (as a percent of total internet email) is sent are staggering.

I don't see how you could possibly say that more people are affected by squatting than spam. Especially when you consider that the issue that ICANN is actually working on here is domain "tasting", not domain squatting. I could certainly agree that people who are typo-squatting are having a negative impact, but I can't see domain tasting having a significant impact on a meaningful portion of the internet user population.

Re:percentages

[unity100]

same arguments can be put against internet crime in your context. each email receives spam. the people who are using decent services like gmail, or serious web hosts for email do not receive any noticeable amount of spam. first hand experience. its a choice matter, not inevitability.

Re:percentages

[damn_registrars]

people who are using decent services like gmail, or serious web hosts for email do not receive any noticeable amount of spam
Those are just the effects of filtering you are talking about at that point. You are ignoring the storage and computational costs of those filters. You are also ignoring the false positive effects of the same. You cannot just discard the impact of spam because you like your filters.

And once you take into account the traffic, storage, and computational costs of spam, and how essentially everyone has to pay to deal with it one way or another, you'll see that it has a much larger impact than domain tasting. The real effects of spam hit everyone who has an email address. The real effects of domain tasting really only hit the portion of the internet users that are looking to purchase a new domain name.

Re:percentages

[unity100]

excuse me but you are just escaping to irrelevant arguments as defense.

there are pluses and minuses for everything. entire wold is using cars for transportation, and its working well. but there are the environmental costs that is making entire world pay. same goes for email protocol. it works real well, but it has its downsides. you have to put up with them, because this is the way life works. you cant get a rose without its thorns.

Re:percentages

[damn_registrars]

excuse me but you are just escaping to irrelevant arguments as defense.
I'd be interested in knowing how you came to that conclusion.

I began this thread by stating that more people are affected by spam than by domain tasting. I have stayed on topic with that throughout. Every statement I've made since you replied to this part of the thread has been on how spam affects more people, more significantly, than domain tasting.

I guess if you don't like the argument, you don't have to. But that doesn't make it irrelevant just because you disagree with what I've said.

Re:percentages

[unity100]

I began this thread by stating that more people are affected by spam than by domain tasting. let me give an example and answer both questions of yours, one of which was 'how did you come to that'.

much more people are affected by mosquitoes than spam. or domain tasting. yet, we are not proceeding to drench every lake and pond and stillwater around the world.

because mosquito problem is a minor annoyance. it is a problem only in countries where diseases that are carried around by them still exist. for the rest of the world, its a minor annoyance.

same goes for spam and domain tasting. spam is a minor annoyance that you have to delete 5 to 10 spam/junk emails on average if you are using a decent service. most of them readily end up in junk boxes anyway, and for the mega corporations that provide such services bandwidth and the filtering hardware is not a major problem. if they were, they would act on it long ago. some even using this to sell anti spam services.

compared to spam, domain tasting affects anyone who intend to use domain names. for a small business, not being able to get a domain name to represent its business or its business name means much more than someone having to delete 10 spam from his/her email every day, or a mega corp that is paying a few percent extra bandwidth costs over spam. it can make an online business, or not.

Re:percentages

[damn_registrars]

let me give an example and answer both questions of yours, one of which was 'how did you come to that'.
The question I just posed to you is how did you come to conclude that I am "escaping to irrelevant arguments in defense".

You utterly failed to answer that question. But we can continue anyways.

compared to spam, domain tasting affects anyone who intend to use domain names
Domain tasting can affect people who want to purchase new domain names. It does not affect everyone who intend to use domain names, as you state. People who already own domain names are not affected by domain tasting, since their domains are already registered.

And you are still ignoring the fact that the total portion of internet users looking to purchase new domain names is minuscule in comparison to the total number of people who use email and receive spam.

Furthermore, the cost of domain tasting is not felt by the majority of internet users. Internet users do not suffer any appreciable expense as a result of the small portion of users that are impacted by domain tasting.

On the other hand, every user on the internet is paying an indirect cost (in one way or another) for spam.

Re:percentages

[unity100]

The question I just posed to you is how did you come to conclude that I am "escaping to irrelevant arguments in defense". You utterly failed to answer that question. But we can continue anyways. you utterly failed to establish analogy. the idea is, there are many things in the world that we are utilizing to an extreme extent, and they all have their downsides. if you cant accept drying all still waters because of the mosquito problem, your argument becomes invalid.

Domain tasting can affect people who want to purchase new domain names. It does not affect everyone who intend to use domain names, as you state. People who already own domain names are not affected by domain tasting, since their domains are already registered. you are taking things out of their context here. domain tasting is destructive for someone who needs to purchase domain names. however spam is a minor annoyance for someone using email. you are taking WHOLE internet users and then using that as a sample group. it is wrong. with your logic someone can take 7 billion population on earth and argue that nothing on the internet is a major problem, because internet doesnt involve around 6 billion people.

And you are still ignoring the fact that the total portion of internet users looking to purchase new domain names is minuscule in comparison to the total number of people who use email and receive spam. look above

Furthermore, the cost of domain tasting is not felt by the majority of internet users. Internet users do not suffer any appreciable expense as a result of the small portion of users that are impacted by domain tasting. look above again.

On the other hand, every user on the internet is paying an indirect cost (in one way or another) for spam. again a narrow, one sided look. many sites, communities, services, businesses are not able to reach who would be needing/using them easily because of domain tasters. a national motorbike enthusiast organization having to have to buy a particularnationmotorenthusiasts.in or .info or even .net domain name because someone had squatted the .com one affects many people trying to use those services. even at 2008, people still associate internet with .com addresses, remember it right, type it right. furthermore many older or less web savvy people just give up when they cannot access a web site because they dont remember its domain name.

Re:percentages

[damn_registrars]

the idea is, there are many things in the world that we are utilizing to an extreme extent, and they all have their downsides.
Are you trying to make a point with that statement, or are you just trying to fillibuster the conversation? That statement has virtually no application to the topic or the thread.

If you read back to what I originally said, and take a look at what ICANN's duties are, you'll see that analogies are not needed. Everything I have been saying has been in the context of ICANN's mission to regulate internet registrars. My argument is that ICANN is failing on this mission and instead they are coming up with flimsy decisions like this one that do little to serve the larger internet community.

What I am looking for ICANN to do is to actually take action against registrars who intentionally hold bad records for .com, .org, .net, ... TLDs. Many of the spamvertised domains out there currently have bad registration data, and the registrars know it. ICANN's regulations for registrar accreditation states that registrars have to maintain accurate records.

It's that simple, really.

you are taking things out of their context here. domain tasting is destructive for someone who needs to purchase domain names. however spam is a minor annoyance for someone using email.
Well, being as I started this thread, the context would be what I started discussing. And if you look back, you'll see that I was talking about the number of people affected by spam versus the much smaller number of people affected by domain tasting. Your statement of taking things out of context is itself out of context.

many sites, communities, services, businesses are not able to reach who would be needing/using them easily because of domain tasters.
That is only accurate for groups that are still looking to register domains. How many groups or people are still looking to do this, particularly in comparison to those who already have done it? You haven't really provided any actual data for your argument, in spite of you having changed the title to "percentages".

a national motorbike enthusiast organization
First of all, if by "national" you are referring to a different country than the US, then ICANN is completely irrelevant. ICANN has no control over other countries' TLDs. Hence their rules against domain tasting would be irrelevant anyways.

furthermore many older or less web savvy people just give up when they cannot access a web site because they dont remember its domain name.
That's right, because so many people that use the internet have never heard of google or any other internet search engine, right?

Re:percentages

[unity100]

Are you trying to make a point with that statement, or are you just trying to fillibuster the conversation? That statement has virtually no application to the topic or the thread. if you are not able to get the analogy there, i doubt that debating with you will bear any fruit. therefore ill just run a short reply to your post all in one go and get off this conversation.

law prevails. legally registrars are doing nothing wrong, they are sticking by the laws where they are incorporated and sticking with icann rules too. its the abusers that are abusing the system in places that they can, and you have to proceed with that country's law against it, or international laws, or wto rules. else, you cant go to a registrar and close them down because 'some guys are spamming through some domains in cape verde islands'. its seems that you have a limited understanding of law. i bid you a nice day, and advise you to research some laws on the matter.

yes i put valid contact data on a domain

[unity100]

say i have put some individual i paid $200 a month in cape verde islands as domain registrar. and icann held registrar to its agreement and get this individual's contact info. WHAT is icann going to do about this ? what is anyone going to do about this ?

Re:yes i put valid contact data on a domain

[damn_registrars]

ICANN has the ability to strip a registrar of their ability to sell domains in many of the largest TLDs. Indeed, that is exactly what the accreditation is about - it allows a registrar to sell domains in those TLDs. ICANN is supposed to - though almost never does - strip a registrar of their accreditation and ability to sell these domains when they fail to obey the rules.

It is by no means as punitive as a legal action, but it can be crippling for a registrar to lose their ability to sell .com domains, for example.

big words

[unity100]

for someone who doesnt have the balls to call someone faggot without remaining anonymous.

excellent

[unity100]

though im working in web hosting field since 2003, i havent seen this issue explained that good and that short. actually some of what you told, i even didnt know.

Its about time

[Phiu-x]

Because I tried over 20 domain names for a new business I wanted to start, and could not ONCE found a semi-decent name. Even obscure, nonsense names, they were all taken. I say this rule will only help a bit, they are not gonna drop their good domain names, only the semi-decent will be abandoned. But still, it'll help. They should require that a site must have a certain % of content (beside ads) that is related to de domain name for at least x amount of time or they can deny it. Like a "probation" period. Is it feasible ?

$13.2M/mo

[LightwaveNet]

"If the ICANN board ratifies this position in June, those top three squatters will be getting a monthly bill for $2.2M."

Shouldn't that be $13.2M/mo since they'd have to drop and repay the $0.20 ~6x a month.

Re:$13.2M/mo

[Anonymous Coward]

The IHT article isn't clear if that's 11M *domains registrations* or 11M *domains*. Whether $2M or $13M, some squatters have just woken up to bad news and that's a *good* thing.

you STILL do not understand a thing

[unity100]

its not about what registrar does. its about WHAT i do. if i put a cayman citizen as registrar in there, set up entire operation in his name, and neither icann nor wto nor us govt cant do shit about it, because whatever that is being done is LEGAL in cayman.

Domain name != website (or any other service)...

[neurocutie]

They should require that a site must have a certain % of content (beside ads) that is related to de domain name for at least x amount of time or they can deny it. Like a "probation" period. Is it feasible ?

It seems that some people are forgetting that a domain name has nothing to do with a website. That is, hosting a "legit" and "useful" website using a domain name is NOT the only reasonable activity that demonstrated "non-squatting".

A domain name is simple a human language token for an system of IP addresses. Those IP addresses could be used for ANYTHING and on any port. For example, I may wish to test and develop a unique TCP/IP protocol/service and simply want a name to help me and my colleagues across the country who are helping.

And neither www.DOMAINNAME.X nor DOMAINNAME.X needs to resolve to anything useful.

Nevermind that it is perfectly reasonable to register a domain name and then take one's time to develop a website or some other usage of that domain name (e.g. a new foundation that registers a domain and it could easily take a few years to get a real website going (I've been there). Yet there is no ill intent or squatting in these cases.

So its going to be real hard to define what is squatting and what isn't. I suppose one could develop some rules to get the worse offenders, but it won't be easy...

Legitimate Business

[ParticleMan911]

Dillon Edwards & Company had the same problem finding a domain. clownpenis.fart

Solution already found

[kindbud]

named.conf:--
zone "name-services.com" { type master; file "empty.zone"; };

zone "domainservice.com" { type master; file "empty.zone"; };

zone "fastpark.net" { type master; file "empty.zone"; };

(etc. etc. etc.)

empty.zone:--
@ IN SOA localhost. hostmaster.localhost. ( 2008042900 172800 900 1209600 3600 )
          IN NS localhost.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I don't think you're paying attention...

[damn_registrars]

This all depends on what TLD you place your domain under. If you buy a domain that is a .com, .net, .org, or any of the others that are owned by ICANN, then their rules apply regardless of what country you are in.

However, if you actually read the rules, you'll see that they apply to registrars, and not domain owners. So really it doesn't matter what you do in the Cayman Islands with your domain, as far as ICANN is concerned. However, if your registrar is providing bogus data for your registration, then they are in violation of the terms they are bound to with ICANN if the domain was sold under one of those TLDs.

On the other hand, if it is under a Cayman TLD, then ICANN has no power whatsoever.

What you are missing in your rant is that ICANN is the final arbiter of registration for certain TLDs. They have the power (though almost never use it) to revoke the ability of accredited registrars to sell domains under their TLDs. Though ICANN, as best I know, has never actually de-registered a domain themselves.

Re:

[clint999]

How do you know how many domains someone has? My server is hosting about 75 domains but only a few of them are mine and those all appear to be registered to different groups yet I'm the tech contact for all the rest. Remember when .eu was started up, there

Re:Domain name != website (or any other service)..

[menace3society]

No, but you could (not necessary should, but COULD) require them to respond in some way to basic HTTP requests on TCP port 80 that would identify the domain and the function it is supposed to be performing.

For example, http://rtfm.mit.edu/ puts up a static-content page that tells you what the site is for, even though it's meant to be an ftp repository for usenet FAQs (I realize that rtfm.mit.edu is not actually a domain name, and also that there's really no reason not to have a web interface for something like that in 2008, but that's not really the point I'm making so lay off, all right?).

no you are not paying attention

[unity100]

icann just disseminates domain names according to its rules. so do registrars. if someone legally owns a domain, and is a cayman citizen, and the activity they are doing is not recognized as crime according to international laws, there isnt single shit you can do.

how do you come to that conclusion?

[damn_registrars]

Have you even looked at the ICANN web site? Read the rules for registrars that I already pointed you to.

For that matter, read what I already said. You are talking about crime, and I am talking about ICANN registrar regulations. The two are not the same. ICANN is the corporation that regulates who can sell domains within certain TLDs. It doesn't matter if the activity is criminal anywhere or not, ICANN's ability to act against registrars is based on the registrar accreditation process and requirements.

Kindly take a deep breath, read my posts, and think about what I actually said, rather than what you read it to say, before you respond again. Not once did I say anything about ICANN acting as a law enforcement agent, which is what you appear to believe me to have said.

I just want ICANN to enforce the rules that they have set for registrars. Their rules have nothing to do with whether a website is used for legal or nefarious purposes, rather they are concerned with how registrars maintain client records and accountability.

No ads for tasters!!

[Reziac]

Herby remarks, "And all those sites (well, 95% anyway) are financed by Google, another monopoly."

That's an interesting point. If the advertising revenue from Google and its kin weren't AVAILABLE to domain tasters and short-term squatters, those aspects of the problem would vanish overnight.

So, my challenge to Google et al.: Find a way to ensure that your ads are being delivered ONLY to stable, non-tasted domains. I'd think this part could be accomplished simply by checking the WHOIS info for the first-date-registered for each domain that Google delivers ads to.

Require that the domain be in existence for even as little as 30 days before delivering ads -- thus the ad-mongering domain-taster is FORCED to pay for the whole year if they want to run ads at all, since the 5-day return period is long gone.

It's not much against the whole, but ANYTHING that makes domain tasting unprofitable will help.

Correction

[shentino]

http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1360660/industry_tries_to_curb_cyber_squatting/

TFA is a wee bit off.

The 20 cent nonrefundability has already been ratified and will take effect in 2009.

The June thing was to prevent registrars from offering refunds in certain cases.

"Instead Icann will vote on a plan in June that would bar domain registrars from offering a refund for any domain names deleted during the grace period that exceeds 10 percent of its new registrations in a month. The board has already voted to make their 20-cent per domain fee nonrefundable in 2009 to deter high volume domain tasters who are sampling millions of names. "

have you read anything I have said?

[damn_registrars]

i doubt that debating with you will bear any fruit.
Debating generally involves actually acknowledging that the other person has said something. You, on the other hand, have been just taking what you want to see from my posts, and then twisting it into something other than what I have said. Case in point:

law prevails. legally registrars are doing nothing wrong
I have not said anything about the registrars action (or lack thereof) regarding illegal activities. I have acknowledged several times (yet you have failed several times to read it) that ICANN has no legal authority. ICANN cannot do anything with criminal justice, as they are not involved in it anyways.

But I'd hate to take the wind out of your sails on that one. You seem to enjoy trying to say that my statements imply some sort of legal authority for ICANN, and who am I to stop you?

you cant go to a registrar and close them down because 'some guys are spamming through some domains in cape verde islands'
Kindly show where I asked for such a service. You won't be able to, because I never did. My request is that ICANN actually enforce their rules regarding accurate whois records from registrars. Being as most spamming domains are registered with bogus whois data, it would require the registrars to clean up their act or stop selling spamvertised domains in the .com, .org, .net, ... TLDs.

its seems that you have a limited understanding of law
It is clear that you have almost zero understanding of my posts, or of ICANN and their responsibilities. I encourage you to read the registrar accreditation agreement that I provided a link to earlier.

Feel free also to actually read my posts that you feel you are replying to, and then come back and apologize for your astonishing misunderstanding of what I said. I'll be waiting, though I certainly won't be holding my breath.

Re:have you read anything I have said?

[unity100]

have a nice day

Re:have you read anything I have said?

[damn_registrars]

I'll take that as your admission that you haven't actually read what I have written. I can understand from reading what you have written that you have far too much pride to admit that you initiated, and maintained, your side of the argument on your mis-reading of what I said.

You have been forgiven for your mistake. Hopefully you've learned a little about your own assumptions and will read more carefully before going down the same path in the future.

Hopelessly Incorrect Calculations

[billstewart]

No. You're mixing up the required revenue for an individual name to be valuable, the average revenue for the practice of tasting to be profitable with a $0.20 ICANN fee, and the average revenue required with a full no-refund policy on both the ICANN and Registry fees.

An individual name is profitable if it gets more than ~6.42/year, because that's the cost of registering and keeping it, including the ICANN fee and Registrar fee. Tasting as a practice is profitable today if the additional fees charged by a registrar are cheap enough that revenue on profitable names makes enough money to cover those fees, and enough registrars are in a sleazy race-to-the-bottom on prices that you can find some registrar willing to put up with you kiting a lot of names in return for some appropriate share of the profit.

With the 20-cent ICANN fee becoming non-refundable, anybody who's kiting names needs to make enough revenue on the average name they keep to pay for the 20-cent fees on the names they don't keep, as well as on the name itself. Thus, the 6.42 + 199*0.20 = $46.22, assuming the 1-in-200 keep rate. But that's still an average - you'd still keep the names that make more than their $6.42 cost, but if you don't make enough money on average, you'll have to get out of the business (yay!)

This only turns into a $1284 average revenue requirement if you have to pay the entire $6.42 fee on every name you use (which is the cost of buying 200 names - and even that's bogus, because some of those 200 names were names that made non-zero money, but less than $6.42 so they weren't keepers, and in this case you've got no incentive to return them even if they didn't work out.)

The 20-cent fee does kill off one part of the domain-kiting market entirely, though, which is the people who keep rolling over their 5-day registrations and never buy the name. To keep the name for a year, you need to roll it over at least 73 times, and probably more to make sure you don't miss, which will cost at least $14.60, which is more than the $6.42 for registering it legitimately. So even if the whole sleazy process is profitable, at least this fee will cut down on some of the name-kiting transactions that go on.

Re:Hopelessly Incorrect Calculations

[Reziac]

No, what they figured (this is from TFA, not me) is that since it takes NN-many attempts to come up with ONE profitable domain, the cost of those NN-many attempts (if you don't get it entirely refunded) has to be figured into the profit equation.

And I was surprised that their number was so high, but consider that over 99% of tasted domains are rolled over.... without refunds, suddenly that's a good deal more cash, even at a few cents apiece.

Re:Hopelessly Incorrect Calculations

[billstewart]

I'll take TFA's word for the only-one-in-200-gets-kept figure (99.5%). We don't really know what fraction of those names are making _some_ money, because the 199 duds include some names that only get tasted once and some names that get repeatedly kited every time their 5-day period runs out, and the article doesn't really differentiate.

The cost of those 199 dud attempts is currently near-zero (so it's worthwhile kiting names even if you don't put much effort into predicting their quality very well, because you'll find out soon enough which ones work.) (Techically the price is slightly above zero, because of the cost of money on $6.42 for five days, so it's around $0.01 per name.) So the name-kiters can keep rolling over names today, either buying any name that makes over $6 or continuing to kite names for free while hoping that other DNS-abusers don't steal them at the end of the grace period (which they'd do for names that make
The proposed ICANN fee raises that to $0.20 each, which is where the $46.22 figure comes in, basically $6 for the name you keep and $40 for the duds. That one seems reasonable - you'd still keep any name that makes more than $6.42/year in revenue, but you need to *average* over $46.22 per good name if you're going to stay in business because the duds cost you money. Also, the 20-cent fee for names turns over >73 times/year, which is ~$14.60, so you can't do the continuous-kiting game any more - if a name's not making $6/year, you drop it, and that'll probably cut down a lot on the transaction rates. (Again, that's not really precise, because even some of the duds will make non-zero money - $6/year is about 9 cents per 5-day-grace-period, but you might get some names making 5 cents during the period even if they're not making enough to actually buy.)

But the $1284/year = 200 * $6.42 is different - that's the cost of actually buying all 200 names, as opposed to buying the one good one and only paying the ICANN tasting fee on the duds. It's an even fuzzier figure - it really means that domain-tasting gamblers need to average $6.42/name to stay in the tasting business (which we're guessing won't happen), but again, some of those names might make $3 even if they're not making $6.42, so the best name doesn't need to make the whole $1284.

Re:Hopelessly Incorrect Calculations

[Reziac]

Yeah, I agree there are a lot of guesses and assumptions there... a worst-case-for-tasters scenario. But even $50/year out of their pockets is that much less profit, and anything that makes their lives harder is good by me :)

As someone else pointed out, tho, the REAL financial *enablers* are the advertising vendors, primarily Google. If they would refuse to serve ads to any domain that hasn't been continuously registered for at least 30 days (which presumably could be confirmed by WHOIS info), a lot of this BS would go away, because the tasters would be forced to pay in full for each domain used (by the time ad revenue starts, it's too late to get a refund).

ICANN part vs. Registry/Registrar Part

[billstewart]

Currently, ICANN takes a 20-cent cut of the registration fee, the registry and registrars get to split $6.22 somehow, and the registrars get to charge whatever they like above that for convenient friendly service etc.

Back when somebody at ICANN invented the Annoying Grace Period that facilitates Domain Tasting, they mandated that the registry and registrars give the money back if somebody returns a domain name within 5 days. I guess it "seemed like a good idea at the time", but of course it's become obvious since then that that was a bad idea.

Think of the 20-cent fee as the beginning of ICANN saying "Yes, we made a mistake" - there's too much ego involved, and too many of the current crop of registrars making a profit on this scammery that they don't want to let go of, for ICANN to simply fix their mistake in one step, because now they've got to compromise with all that political pressure. So they're imposing the policy with their part of the fee now, and it really will help get rid of many of the anklebiters in the domain-name-kiting business.

Once that happens, if enough of them go away, ICANN'll probably just stop there, or maybe they'll wait another 6-12 months, declare it to be a successful test or a Really Good Start, and then finish the job by getting rid of the policy entirely.

ICANN shouldn't be in the censorship business

[billstewart]

As much as some people in the US government, and a few people like you in the Enemies-of-Evil business, would like it, ICANN shouldn't be in the censorship business, and for the most part they aren't. They're in the business of administering name space, and they're trying to make sure they don't sell names that violate existing trademarks - and even that's controversial, because there are businesses in different geographical areas with similar names (Joe's Pizza in different cities), and businesses in different types of business with similar names ("Coke" is that stuff you make by heating coal, and there's no trademark conflict with the brown liquid or the white powder), and the extent to which ICANN insists on violating the privacy of DNS name holders to make trademark lawsuits easy is pretty significant. For the most part, ICANN's dispute resolution process is designed to keep the registrars from having to go to court to deal with Dispute Resolution, because selling cheap domain names means they can't afford to do that, and ICANN doesn't want to pay for it either.

If you want to call your domain I-Got-This-Name-First.com, and somebody else already has that name trademarked, ICANN's policies should prevent you from getting it second, though arguably they could leave room in the DNS structure for disambiguating legitimate multiple uses of names. But if you want to call your website Pirated-Microsoft-Software.com, that's an issue between you and Microsoft to resolve the trademark conflict, and it's certainly not ICANN's business to decide if you really _do_ sell pirated Microsoft software.

Remember that judge who let those Cayman bankers get a temporary injunction against Wikileaks.org's domain name? Even he realized that it was a mistake, in spite of the number of people who don't like Wikileaks posting things that they don't like.

Re:ICANN shouldn't be in the censorship business

[damn_registrars]

Kindly read what I said before you reply to it.

people like you in the Enemies-of-Evil business, would like it, ICANN shouldn't be in the censorship business, and for the most part they aren't
I never said that they were, nor did I ever ask them to be. My gripe with ICANN is in how they deal with registrars, or rather in how they don't.

If you go back and read what I posted, you will see that my gripe is in how they fail to actually enforce the regulations that they place on registrars. In particular, they require accredited registrars to provide accurate whois data. However, if you run a whois on a spamvertised domains, odds are the whois data for it is bogus, incomplete, or both. And the registrars know this, but yet willingly hand in the bogus and/or incomplete whois data.

My gripe is that ICANN continues to do nothing about it. I have never asked ICANN to get involved in censorship. I have read their statements on their website (have you?).

ICANN's Registrar Obligation Terms are Bad

[billstewart]

I would have used a longer term than "Bad", such as "Egregious" or "OverReaching" or "Abusive", but /. thought the title was too long.... :-)

Maybe you haven't been watching the domain name policies evolve, and assume that they way they are today is both good and necessary. I've been paying attention to them since the mid-80s, and back then it wasn't clear that the market would even accept a system that had a single Root in charge of who could use what names - after all, UUCP worked quite well without it, and the Plan 9 folks had a bunch of really strong arguments for why local-centric naming was better. And I watched the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee work on policies for how to expand the TLD space while the Trademark Gods tried to prevent that from happening (and the bad guys won...) Those "obligations" you're referring to are rules ICANN made, and they'd have been controversial at the time except that ICANN had a policy of ignoring anybody who disagreed with them so controversy wasn't permitted.

The purpose of whois contact information was originally so that if something wasn't working, you could contact the owners of a name to fix it, and once they started charging money for domain names, it was also so that the registrar could reach a name registrant to tell them to pay their bill. That's all - those functions don't require that you provide your True Name, ICBM address, retina print from remaining eyeball, mother's maiden name, first born child's DNA, etc., and they can take care of the billing issues by accepting payment in advance or billing you by email.

From the standpoint of the Trademark Gods, which is what ICANN requires all their registrars to collaborate with, a DNS registration needs to have enough information to get you a subpoena with your name on it in case of a trademark lawsuit (which is where most of the requirement for True Name, Jurisdiction, and Postal Address came from). Various flavors of cops, spammers, and other anti-privacy types think this is just a fine idea, and have tried to extend it. On the other hand, some of the registrars have been providing some private registration services, in some case with some jurisdictional diversification. If you want to spend ~$100/year, you can also get your privacy the old-fashioned way - I've tracked at least one spammer's whois registration to the street address of "The Company Corporation", who've been the canonical business setting up cheap Delaware corporations for over a century, so even if I had successfully sued the spammers for big bucks, their only real assets were a file-folder in a drawer at The Company Corporation, and they could get back in business by spending another $100 for another corporate shell.

Obviously you can't do the same level of dispute resolution or problem-solving if you don't have somewhat usable contact information. It's really helpful to have the technical contact information for a domain be something other than an email address at that domain, because if the DNS is broken, you can't send them the email, but example-dot-com-technical-contact@yahoo.com is perfectly reasonable, and I'd rather not put my home or cellular phone number on a whois page that somebody could call at any time day or night (as opposed to an office phone, which would be perfectly reasonable for a domain owned by a business.) But if there's a legitimate domain name ownership dispute, and the registrar can't reach you by any of the contact mechanisms you choose to provide to them, it's reasonable for the registrar to resolve the dispute by saying you lose, and making it your problem to get the domain name back. Even that's got problems, especially for a personal domain - if you're on vacation for a month visiting your family in India, you might have trouble getting your email, but you also aren't going to see that paper subpoena that the alleged trademark owner put in your home mailbox.

And of *course* you were asking for ICANN to police people

Re:ICANN's Registrar Obligation Terms are Bad

[damn_registrars]

I'm not sure where you're going with most of what you've just said. But I will start with your faulty assumption (again):

And of *course* you were asking for ICANN to police people who want to buy domain names
I urge you to go back to my original post and read it more carefully. At no point did I ask ICANN for policing of domain registrants. My complaint is that ICANN does a horse-shit job of regulating registrars.

Have you read the requirements for accredited registrars? They really don't ask much from the registrars, and really they don't even ask that accredited registrars keep up to the terms of accreditation.

I really don't care what domains are registered. There is plenty of registered garbage on the internet, and I don't care about the vast majority of it. What bothers me is that ICANN is failing in their duty to monitor who sells domains on the internet.

One particular example would be in the case of country-specific TLDs. Or rather, the use and non-use thereof. Obviously ICANN has no role in the TLDs of other countries, and I'm fine with that. People can buy, sell, and barter for other TLDs with whatever amount of information they want. However, when domains within the ICANN-regulated TLDs are sold, they really should have coherent whois data, and be managed by registrars who speak coherent English.

Instead, spammers and criminals take advantage of foreign registrars that are known to ignore the rules. Domains in the .com TLD that are purchased for the specific purpose of selling drugs or pirated software are often themselves purchase through these known shady registrars. Does nobody else find it interesting that these registrars will provide (bogus) whois data in English, and then apparently forget how to speak English when contacted about the domains? Remember also that the form for registrar accreditation has to be filled out in English.

The ICANN rules state how a registrar is supposed to go about their business if they want to sell from within specific TLDs. It says nothing about content or censorship, nor have I ever asked for that. Just because you have twice accused me of such does not make it true.

All I am asking is that ICANN start holding registrars accountable for keeping legit and accurate whois data, and be capable of communicating in the spoken language that is relevant to the country behind their TLD.

Re:ICANN's Registrar Obligation Terms are Bad

[billstewart]

Fine, if you want to be precise about it, you're asking for ICANN to require that their registrars enforce anti-privacy policies so that they and other people can police people who want to buy domain names, rather than asking that ICANN do the police work themselves. (But if you've followed ICANN for very long, you know that they want to control all the TLDs, not just the .us and old and new global TLDs. And the global TLDs are supposed to be global, though some of them were US-centric at the beginning.)

And I've accused you twice of wanting to police them because you're complaining that the lack of whois contact information makes it difficult to police them, and given specific examples of content (selling drugs and pirated software) for which you think ICANN should do something different.

Furthermore, your accusation that ICANN's failing to fulfill its duty in monitoring who sells domains on the Internet implies that you think that it has a duty, and that enforcing the whois rules that ICANN itself made are part of that duty. If you want to argue that ICANN shouldn't make rules if it doesn't plan to enforce them, I'll be happy to agree with you, but those particular rules are rules it shouldn't have made.

If ICANN has any appropriate duties, it's to become the representative body that it said it was going to be when it got the US Department of Commerce to give it the job; lots of people have written about how it's evaded that kind of structure, and reading Karl Auerbach's years of comments about it should be a fairly good start. As much as I respect and admire Esther, she didn't do a very successful job of getting the organization she founded to behave itself, and the people who've followed her have taken it even farther away from any pretense of representativeness.

I don't think ICANN's been 100% bad - it's done a few things quite well, though I think that overall it's stifled innovation in many potentially interesting areas. DNS is flexible enough that you can work around many things by adding a layer of indirection, e.g. the people who have the domain example.com can do anything they want with their subdomains even if .com or the root won't support them. But some things have been serious mistakes, like inventing domain tasting and requiring the registrars to support it, and the directions they've gone with multilingual domain names have been a total mess (not that it's an easy problem), and I'm inclined to guess that they've delayed IPv6 deployment by a year or so with their address space policies (though that's a mixed blessing, since that's also delayed the creation of an IPv6 equivalent of IPv4 swamp space.) And they've been blatant rent-seekers; I think the whole problem should have been left in the hands of the IETF.

Re:ICANN's Registrar Obligation Terms are Bad

[damn_registrars]

Once again, you are inserting the term "policing" because that is what you want to read my post to be about. I have never asked for ICANN to do any policing, nor have I been asking for anyone else to do policing in their place.

I am simply asking that ICANN actually require the registrars that they have accredited to follow the terms of registrar accreditation. Why is this so hard for you to understand?

The examples that I gave are not because I am looking for enforcement for specific situations. Indeed, as I have told you now at least three times I am not looking for ICANN to police anything. I have accepted since the first post that law enforcement is not an ICANN responsibility, in spite of how badly you want to believe that I am saying otherwise.

I used those specific examples only because they are two cases where the whois data was obviously deficient in regards to the domain registrant. There are plenty of others as well, but I encounter these the most often. And I will say again, just as I have already said several times, I am not looking for ICANN to police the criminals behind the drug and piracy domains. I just want ICANN's customers - the registrars who sell domains in these specific TLDs - to be held accountable for keeping correct whois data. There is no expectation of law enforcement at that level. Indeed, since most of the time, the registrars are located (at least in theory) in other countries, law enforcement would be all but impossible for anyone in this country to do.

I'm asking for accurate whois records, thats all. It is something that ICANN claims to hold registrars responsible for, except they fail miserably at it.

ICANN's primary mission on the internet today, as best I can tell, is to assign accredited status to registrars so that they can sell domains within particular TLDs. I feel this is a worthwhile function, to keep DNS from turning into arbitrary mish-mash as could happen if every Tom, Dick, and Harry were allowed direct access to it. Being as they are the ones who decide who can perform this function, I agree that they should have some minimum requirements imposed on who can and who cannot. I am just asking them to enforce the requirements, rather than just take the form, the payment, and let registrars loose on their merry ways with no concern whatsoever for the records that said registrars keep.

Could you please just read what I wrote, for what it says, rather than what you want it to say?

Google vs. Domain Tasters

[billstewart]

Actually Google announced a couple of months ago that they'd stop accepting AdSense advertising for kited domains. The first article or two that I just looked at said it didn't know the specifics of how they were going to identify those domains - you could speculate that they'd use whois data, but you could also speculate that some registrars would start offering to backdate their whois records just to thwart that... (:-)

Re:Google vs. Domain Tasters

[Reziac]

Ah, I'd missed that, thanks. (Or forgotten about it. Mind like a ...??) Yeah, no doubt some registrars are that crooked, and I imagine some of the kiters ARE registrars.... Google et al. will just have to figure out which can be trusted, and not deal with domains that come through the known crooks.