CircleID

Rajnesh,

Glad to hear a happy ending!

The registration success suggests either an anomaly in the domain tasting market or luck. The following are some plausible explanations of the former:
1.  The market is not competitive.
2.  Tasters are naïve.
3.  Tasters have colluded and agreed to demonstrate to the world that they are giving domainers a 1-hour widow of opportunity to register names.
4.  It is too costly to run their scripts every few minutes.
5.  Tasters are very sophisticated. When observing that the domain name went through few drop-pickup cycles, they all determined that it was not worth pursuing.

Any thoughts?

Rajnesh,

If you haven't read the ICANN ad hoc group report on domain tasting, you may find it interesting.  It's accessible at http://gnso.icann.org/drafts. 

The GNSO Council is planning to vote at its 31 October meeting in LA whether to start a policy development process on domain tasting.  If you'll be at the ICANN Meeting, I encourage you to attend the GNSO Council Public Forum and Meeting. 

Any thoughts on how to eliminate tasting other than to eliminate the Add Grace Period?

(Disclosure:  I'm one of the IPC reps on the GNSO Council.)

This year's ICANN budget contained the following statement:

"Consistent with previous years, domains deleted within the “add or auto-renew” grace periods will not be charged a transaction fee."

The Board asked for public comments on the budget.  One, and only one, comment was received; it came from an Advisory Committee to the board that recommended applying the registrar level transaction fee to add grace period transactions in order to curtail domain tasting activities.

The ICANN Board chose to ignore that recommendation.  The board could have instantaneously solved the domain tasting problem by applying such fees, but instead they chose to do nothing. 

Maybe instead of focusing on how to eliminate tasting, we should figure out how to eliminate this unresponsive and irresponsible board.