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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."
So the semi-legitimate use you can dig up is that companies want to buy up bundles of DNs and drop ads there to see if type-in traffic or google searches can make them enough bank to warrant keeping it up. Personally, sounds like a get rich quick scheme providing nothing -- maybe even negative confusion -- to society and should therefore be discouraged.
... do we see where this is going? Again, free DN registration, stupid that this should even have a term even stupider that it works for people with a lot of patience aiming to save $12/year.
Next you got domain kiting. Where a jerk "tastes" under one registrar and then cancels five days later and "tastes" under another an then cancels five days later and then "tastes" under yet another registrar
And what's left? Domain Name Front Running like our friend Network Solutions? Remind me again what sound logic caused domain name tasting to be introduced in the first place?
Lastly, after reading the short report, I'm lead to believe that we're still allowing 10% AGP deletes. My question is simple: Given the above reasons for domain tasting, why allow it at all? I mean everyone's spinning this move in a positive light except for scam artists and con men. So why not just seal the deal and make it "Officially Officially Dead" in a policy?
My work here is dung.
One of the unfortunate aspects of networked computing is that the cost of antisocial behaviors is so small
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. I say we take off and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
We need a new tag: "eventualoutbreakofcommonsense"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What was the purpose of "domain testing" anyway??
Obviously, some domains have gone bad, like milk left out too long. You don't want to drink the whole thing, so, um, you taste a little bit of it? To see if it's gone sour? Maybe we could replace it with domain smelling, or domain giving it to your wife to see if she spits it out?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
The next step is to enforce ICANN rule 4.2.5 to prohibit registrars from warehousing or speculating in domains.
It's not like scammers work with a single domain. $6.75 * 1,000 or 10,000 is certainly going to discourage some people from being a douchebag. These are people who make tiny amounts of money from a ton of places, $6.75 is enough to destroy each small revenue stream for them.
It's sort of like when you take a penny from the tray at 7-11, except it's a much larger tray, and they take several million times.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black