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Domain Tasting "Officially Dead" Thanks To Cancellation Policy
Ars Technica is reporting that domain tasting has been all but eradicated now that the full penalty for excessive cancellations has taken effect. "In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009. The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent."
What was the purpose of "domain testing" anyway??
Money, young grasshopper. Money. From TFA:
Never ones to let a good deed go unpunished, scammers quickly learned to take advantage of a user-friendly policy that allowed a misregistered domain name--perhaps due to a typo--to be withdrawn at no cost. Scammers used this "Add Grace Period" to grab huge numbers of domains, throw up pages full of advertising, then withdraw the applications before the bill came due. It was a practice known as "domain tasting," and it gave the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a bad case of indigestion.
Registering a bunch of domains to see if any are already getting enough traffic to generate enough revenue to make hanging onto the domain worth it or canceling it before the bill comes. Aggressive typo-cybersquatting, a lot of it. Here.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
What was the purpose of "domain testing" anyway??
The cited reason, though dubious, was to for example, register your business under a dozen variations of domain names, wait a few weeks or a month, let things hit the search engines etc, and see which one or two get you the most traffic, register those few, and cancel the rest.
The reality of course, due to low and nonexistent abuse provisions, was that the domain squatters moved in en masse and tasted a few hundred thousand domains a month each, on a rotating basis, causing every reasonable unregistered domain name to be perpetually under taste by a squatter, that would be more than happy to sell you the domain for a few hundred or few thousand dollars.
I see this as a good thing for several reasons. Firstly, domain squatters need to die anyway and another nail in their coffin is fine by me. Secondly, I am tired of mistyping a url or poking around with probables looking for something, only to land on "what I need, when I need it." That about makes me want to vomit at this point. Before this enforcement, practically ANY domain name you could enter in was either taken and had content possibly in your interest, (10%) or was under taste. (90%) Now we can start seeing our browser's domain-not-found page once in awhile again.
But then again now we will experience the return of those "helpful DNS redirections" from microsoft and your local ISP.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
because your ISP is tasting all the domains you visit through their DNS. Can they not sell a list of the most popular misspelled domain names? I was alarmed the other day when I mistyped a nonexistant domain and comcast's domain helper came up.
http://www.comcastvoices.com/2009/07/domain-helper-service-here-to-help-you.html
Helps with typo-squatting, etc. Keep the domains with high returns and ditch the others. Don't even have to pay for the ones that don't pan out.
Say Google [...] pagerank=0 OTHER, real websites that had the same ad providers these scammers use.
You seem to be assuming Google "do no evil"; I'm afraid you're a few years out of date:
http://www.google.com/domainpark/
No you can't. All sales are final.
The shady people were the registrar's /themselves/.