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ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Jan 30, 2008 08:09 AM
from the not-before-time dept.
from the not-before-time dept.
jehnx writes "Following Google's crackdown on 'domain tasters', ICANN has voted unanimously to eliminate the free period that many domain buyers have been taking advantage of. At the same meeting they also discussed Network Solutions' front running but took no action on it."
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Google Adsense Cracking Down on 'Tasters' 187 comments
ZerothOfTheLaw writes "It appears that Google is going to eliminate Adsense for Domains for all domains younger than five days old.
From the post 'The Good news is that the Quantity of advertising will be spread among fewer domains now and so those domain owners that actually own real full domains should receive more money if bid prices start to rise as a result of this. However some advocates of Domain Tasting say that perhaps no one will be able to serve the niche for some ads and no one will make money on the unserved ads.'"
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KISS (Score:5, Funny)
(all other posts after this are either wrong or repeating)
Re:KISS (Score:5, Funny)
Overall a great decision, but . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
About a year ago I registered a domain that had a transliteration of a foreign word. I discovered, within a few hours, that my transliteration was not the preferred spelling (for example, "perogi" as opposed to the preferred "pirogi"). I asked my registrar to refund my money for the first domain and registered the domain with the preferred spelling.
Honest mistake and no one was harmed in the process of deleting the undesired domain. Sure, I could have researched that transliterated word before registration but it simply did not occur to me that a spelling which in my day (yeah, I'm over 40) was correct would have been superseded. (Sort of like finding out BBQ is actually spelled "barbecue".)
Re:Overall a great decision, but . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
ICANN says it pretty eloquently:
In other words, your experience has become the exception (by a factor of millions) not the rule and a few bad apples have ruined it for the rest of us.
Network Solutions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Network Solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Network Solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
Although: if ICANN eliminate the free tasting period, so that it costs network solutions some money for each domain they "protect from domain tasters" in this way, it would surely be fun to go to networksolutions.com and do a few hundred more searches for random domain names.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Normally you use whois (which exists as a commandline tool), but you can also use DNS, for example
Of course, you haveRe:Network Solutions (Score:4, Informative)
Some ISPs compile a database of DNS requests for non-existant domains and sell these to the people who put up those obnoxious advertising sites. Your lookup may trigger one of these companies to buy the domain.
Re:Network Solutions (Score:4, Informative)
Is this really about domain tasting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is this really about domain tasting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this really about domain tasting (Score:4, Informative)
Where's the tag? (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, it doesn't seem to be a sudden outbreak, though... Reading the notes (yeah, I RTFA) I can see that with the possible exception of Bruce Tonkin (who dropped off the call because of possible conflict of interest, thus making him a good guy no matter his opinion on this matter) everyone agreed that any measure except removing of the Add Grace Period (AGP) would be ineffective and only cause other harm to the community.
It's also obvious from the notes that they've spent no little time thinking about this, and they had their arguments ready. And when talking was done, they were ready to do the right thing. All of them, unanimously.
It was unclear whether the 21-day period was in effect, though... They talked about having to notify the public of policy changes 21 days in advance or more. Even if it is, 3 weeks is pretty short.
Re:Where's the tag? (Score:5, Informative)
They could deal with an actual problem instead... (Score:5, Interesting)
I say no.
ICANN has the role of accreditation of domain name registrars themselves (particularly for
Bad registrars, such as pacnames.com, yesnic.com, and more recently mouzz.com, are willing partners in the international spamming epidemic. They have or still do sell domains to computer criminals, willingly accepting bogus data from these criminals in exchange for a kickback.
If ICANN really wants to make a positive difference on the internet, they need to flex their muscle and make use of their ability to un-accredit bad registrars. Why they continue to neglect the opportunity to do so is beyond me.
Re:They could deal with an actual problem instead. (Score:3, Insightful)
If pacnames, yesnic and mouzz are getting kickbacks from the criminals, maybe they are sending a cut to ICANN.
What is interesting to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was most annoying, but the fact it came up as the first link, means google really should do soemthing about sites abusing the ranking systems and not just people abusing the adsense program.
cyber squatters (Score:3, Insightful)
Ofcourse, in economic terms, it would probably be worth it in the long run if you have a very good idea to pay some extra for the better domain name. But its like paying for "protection" money because the alternative is worse...
Don't worry about the name (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a good idea for a website, pick a unique, memorable name, not an obvious one. Who's the number one auction site; auction.com or eBay? Who's the number one on-line bookseller; books.com or Amazon? What is an ebay anyway? What does a river in Brazil have to do with books? Nothing, it doesn't matter, most people are going to find your website through Google anyway rather than typing in a URL.
ICANN says (Score:5, Funny)
good move (Score:3, Insightful)
Or can anyone here name me one not-advertisement-related reason for "domain tasting"? The only use I've ever read about is registering the domain and checking if you get enough hits on it to run your ads with enough profit, before you commit yourself.
Impact on registrars like GoDaddy? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder what impact this will have on registrars such as GoDaddy.com who (according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]) have 55.1 million domain names registered a year of which 51.5 million are canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period.
While GoDaddy.com doesn't get to keep that money, it does generate a revenue flow. That is, GoDaddy.com must return the money, but there's no requirement to cut a check that day. It may be a week or three before GoDaddy.com has to cut a refund check. In the meantime they have money to work with much like banks do. Most businesses operate on revenue flow and not strictly the net balance they have available at any one time.
If ICANN drops this grace period and domain tasters drop away (possible if unlikely) that leaves GoDaddy.com with 51.5 million domains at $10 per domain (or $515 million) in revenue flow that just dried up. That's a lot of money to just disappear from your business finances.
IANAA, but I think that this decision will have the most impact on large registrars. Perhaps a one day grace period for people who honestly made a mistake would have been more appropriate. One day is not enough to get a domain properly "tasted" because it takes about that long for the DNS entry to propagate through the network, and by the time it was out the domain would either be permanent or gone.
Re:Impact on registrars like GoDaddy? (Score:4, Insightful)
As you said, they can't do that any more so they'd have either 55 million domains registered with 0 cancels, or 3.5 million domains registered for legitimate reasons and 51.5 million domains that weren't registered because the registeree couldn't get a temporary freebie.
It's also a lot of revenue to be relying on when a good proportion of it will be from suspect activities (spammers/squatters) who could be restricted by decisions such as this at any moment.
At the end of the day if GoDaddy vanishes then it's no big loss. All the smaller registrars will survive without the 'ill gotten gains' money and registrars will continue. It happens with