John,
What is interesting is that aggressive and automated domain tasting seems to occur almost exclusively through just a handful of registrars (I should know).

-Ram

Although this business practice may indeed be in bad taste (it certainly makes me want to puke) are you sure it’s really bad for the registries?

Maybe their systems are automated to the point where the extra load doesn’t negate the value associated with receiving payment on stupid domains that end up working out for the domainers?

If they add extra chargers that discourage the business practice, they might be walking away from what is actually good business for them.

Last week I had dinner with one of the execs at the .ORG registry, and he told me quite vehemently that it’s costing them significant real money to handle all the speculative registrations and cancellations.  That’s not surprising—you build your system to handle the load you expect to handle, and if it then turns out the load is 10 or 100 times that, you’re going to have to scale up the system accordingly.

I can’t feel all that sorry for .ORG, considering the vast surplus they deliver to ISOC, but if that surplus is going to be eaten up, I’d rather it be eaten by something better than people trying out millions of ways to misspell Yahoo.

Sorry, stupid question follows…

Okay then, so if the registry has already decided that their 5-day grace period is a bad business practice for them, why don’t they just, uh, change it?  They created it in the first place, didn’t they?

Uh, no, the registries didn’t create it.  Surely you read the second and seventh paragraphs of the article you’re responding to.

Ah yeah, I forgot about the ICANN <-> registry contract when I was making my followup post.

Like you say, there’s a pretty simple solution to the problem...probably more than one, even.

John, to complete your article: Not only gTLDs allow domain tasting, some of the ccTLDs also allow is, in some cases for a period of a few weeks.

When the grace period concept was raised to the ICANN board, the only kind of grace period discussed was a “redemption grace” period to help people who accidently forgot to renew.  (The board accepted “redemption grace” at the meeting of March 14, 2002 in Accra, Ghana.)

The concept of “add grace”, i.e. the 5 day free taste, was never brought before the board nor was it ever discussed.

In other words “add grace” is a creation of ICANN’s staff.  It was put into the contracts without properly informing the board of what kinds of things they added into hundreds of pages of contractual terms.

As it stands the actual language in the contracts for “add grace” pertains to a period at the start of a new registration.  In those case where registrars are using this provision to take a 5-day taste of a name deleted by one of their customers it is hard to accept that this is a really a new registration.  In other words, it may well be the case that at least some of this tasting is not justified under the existing contracts.

But the real concern here is this: ICANN recently justified an increase of the Verisign registry fee to $7 plus 7% on the basis that this amount is needed to cover Verisign’s registry expenses and leave a bit over to encourage innovation.

As we see from the numbers, the actual cost to Verisign is about $0.02 or less.  That does not seem to warrant the $7, or 35000% profit, that ICANN is allowing Verisign to charge.

In other words, when, and if, ICANN ever fixes this egregious abuse, it should also remember to re-establish the Verisign registry fee (as well as the fees to other registries) at a level that reflects actual costs, which we now now is at most a few cents per name per year and nowhere near the $6 or $7 dollars now being levied on domain name users.

We’re starting to see botnets now taking advantage of this free period.  It’s going to get ugly.  A botmaster can register a domain to track their botnet / distribute their malware, and then poof, its gone the next day with no trace.  They move on to their next one.  An algorithm built into the malware that knows what domains to look for on what days could cause an endless supply of hard to track domains.

Please fix this - there are many ways.  The only reason we see for giving this grace period is when you find that you’ve been given a fraudulent credit card and you need to cancel it (typically within 5 days).  Give a registrar a certain amount of refunds and then thats it.

Some registries are considering implementing ideas such as a “Restocking Fee”.  There is mixed reaction among registrars, maybe because there’s real $$ here…

Bob Parsons of Godaddy suggested making the 25 cent ICANN fee non-refundable, which would do the same thing and avoid giving the registries an incentive to encourage tasting churn. I don’t see how registries can impose a restocking fee without getting permission from ICANN to revise the agreements.  But if they’re going to do that, why not just get rid of the AGP completely, since by general agreement nobody asked for it in the first place?