DNS Stressed From Financial Maneuverings

jcatcw writes "The Domain Name System is showing signs of being out of control. Automated software systems are being used to re-register large batches of expired domain names. In addition, speculators are using a loophole in the registration process that lets domains be tested for their potential profitability as pay-per-click advertising sites during a free five-day "tasting" period."

Re: Why is this news?

[rs79]

It was news 2 years ago when it first started happening.

ICANN which (on paper) "measures community consensus and implements it as policy" is the entity that had to approve the policies that lets this happen.

No domain expires any more, the registrars snap them up on principle, try them out and if they get one click in the "don't have to pay yet" grace period then they keep the domain. Very very few, if any domains actually expire back into the free pool.

What strikes me as hysterical is the people that went on to become ICANN accused the alternative root people 10 years ago of wanting to do exactly this. To be honest we hadn't even thought of it. We just wants to see no centralized single-point-of-failure control over the dns.

I note with irony itoldyouso.com is taken by squatter.

I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[khasim]

And I completely disagree with it.

If you want to test the domain, then LEASE the domain name. None of this automated click-count crap for free while other people who would USE the domain name wait to see if it will ever be available.

I don't see that as the problem

[TheLink]

The problem is with the ICANN - they're mainly collecting money and doing nothing really good for the long term (they approve TLDs that are just "yet another .com"s - see any significant innovations/improvements?). A single Jon Postel could replace the entire ICANN and the world would probably be better for it.

The bigger problem is everyone currently lining up to replace ICANN is probably worse than the ICANN.

Financial maneuvering? Add political maneuvering.

Two obvious fixes

[davidwr]

Fix #1: Eliminate the free tasting period.
If you register fo0.com on May 1 and on May 2 you realize you goof and you meant to register foo.com, fine. But your registration still expires next May 1. In addition, you only get 1 or 2 "free goofs" after which you pay a paperwork fee, maybe a few pennies or less, to cover the actual costs of changing things around.
The people who run DNS should neither gain nor lose if I register 1 name for 1 year vs. I register 100 names for short consecutive periods that add up to 1 year. Currently they lose big time.

Fix #2: Meaningful domain-lapse rules
In general, if a domain is revoked or lapses, nobody except you should be able to claim it without your permission for a certain period of time. I'd suggest a minimum of 30 days.
I theory this is the way it was supposed to work but in practice ....
Obviously there will be special cases, such as names transferred by court order.

Testing period

[Anonymous Coward]

(posting anon because I used mod points)

Who does the testing period benefit besides spammers and squatters? Does someone who legitimately want to use a domain name "test" it for five days... and then what? Of course someone who wants to the domain is going to keep it. But if you don't want it, why did you register it, unless of course you were testing it for how many people accidentally typed your domain name, and then we come back to the spammers and squatters. I'd be interested in knowing a legitimate purpose for this five day testing period.

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[eln]

I agree. I don't understand why this is even offered. The only reason you would want to know how many hits your potential site would get based on its domain name alone is because you were counting on accidental traffic for all or the majority of your income. This pretty much means you're a squatter looking to capitalize on ad impressions. If you're a legitimate business looking to start a web presence, you're going to just buy a domain that pertains to your business, and ADVERTISE it. Then, people who are interested will visit the domain you have advertised.

I could see offering a trial period if a domain name cost $10,000 or something (and maybe they should), but these days you can buy domain names for pretty much nothing anyway, so a trial period is utterly pointless.

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[CastrTroy]

What's an acceptable lease rate though? At $20 a year what should they charge for 5 days? The bigger problem is that they let you test out names at all. Either you want the name or you don't. There's no reason other than typosquatting/domain stealing that it would be a good idea to let people try out a domain name for 5 days.

stale links are the big win

[davidwr]

Suppose I run davidwristhegreatest.com. Suppose a few links exist on the web and I get a handful of hits a day from people clicking on those links.

Now I get tired of being vain so I let the domain expire.

Someone tastes the domain and their ads get viewed by 3-4 people a day.

That's a few thousand people a year.

Pretty soon that adds up to real money.

Re:Two obvious fixes

[nine-times]

Also, you can just charge a nominal fee for some of these things. Let's face it-- a 1 year fee for most hosting isn't that much to begin with, and if you messed up and registered the wrong domain, you'd do that approximately once, and for that a $1 fee probably wouldn't cause anyone to flip out. But if you're registering tons of domains all the time, it will add up.

Am I wrong? Are there legitimate reasons to register tons of domains that might result in purchasing hundreds of mistaken domains in a year? Maybe I just don't get it

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[CastrTroy]

Movie web sites? Does anybody actually go to those? Just about everybody I know goes to apple.com and watches the trailers there. There's no reason to go to 30 different movie sites every month when you can go to 1 and watch previews for all 30 movies.

This seems to be a fairly clear problem

[pembo13]

Just don't allow it. There's no possible positive in even allowing cyberquating. If someone wants to register a website that looks like a cybersquat, attach a clause saying they have x amount of days to put up an actual website, assuming there is a port 80 attached to that domain. Or can the registrars not stay away from the easy money themselves?

Re:Two obvious fixes

[mosch]

If you register fo0.com on May 1 and on May 2 you realize you goof and you meant to register foo.com, fine. But your registration still expires next May 1.

Screw that. If you register fo0.com and you meant to register foo.com, screw you, you're out whatever you spent ($10-35). That's a slightly annoying lesson if you're a regular person. But it would destroy the typosquatting market.

Re:Well maybe its *GASP* Time for Reform

[gregmac]

This is a good idea in theory .. but how do you determine that someone is using them for a "legitimate reason" ?

Is advertising a legitimate reason? Sure, any rational person can see that the typosquatter sites are really just advertising sites, and no content. However, some of them have "search engines" (that just return advertising results..) and how can you argue that those are not legitimate, while google (also a search engine, also returns some paid results/advertising) is? If you mandate that sites have to have useful content, then they'll probably just start inserting blobs of random content, or news feeds, or something else that technically complies with the requirements. Why shut them down, but not, eg, MSN or Yahoo, which are both a bunch of ads crammed around some content?

Unfortunately I don't know how you solve the problem that way. In the end, the squatters will continue, making changes to their sites whenever you change the content requirements, and in the worst case, legitimate sites will be forced to make changes in order to comply (even though a legitimate site should never have to change, since they are legitimate).

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[MrPeach]

It seems to me that the simple fix would be to not allow the entry into the DNS servers until the "tasting" period has passed.

If the purpose is indeed to allow people to change their minds, fix mistakes, or whatever, then this would not in any way cause them problems.

If they want to live test, they can set the IP address in their local DNS. Hell, they can do that without even registering.

Re:WTF???

[notlisted]

And systemic destruction of some communal resource is always a result of their smug abuse of one "loophole" or another.

Bzzt.. wrong. DNS is a communal system but the Name Registry systems used for registration of domain names are not. These registries are usually run by for-profit corporations (e.g. VeriSign for .com) and these companies are anything BUT community resources. It doesn't matter to VeriSign if their $6.00 cut for each registration comes from squatters or legitimate sites.. In fact, they favor the squatters that bring them thousands in annual revenues.

--
Keep your domain ides safe from squatters. [purewhois.com]

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[gad_zuki!]

>This pretty much means you're a squatter looking to capitalize on ad impressions. If you're a legitimate business

Who says DNS registrars care about promiting legitimate business or stopping ad click farms? Its pretty much their bread and butter right now. If there's a problem here, then it can be solved by regulating these registrars. Now, considering these registrars are usually ad impression squatters and domain typo resellers themselves, well, dont hold your breath expecting them to regulate themselves.

Can we make them unprofitable?

[grahamsz]

Presumably the process works like this:

1) Register to trial a domain
2) Wait a few days and count the hits
3) If it didn't get the required number of hits then drop it, otherwise pony up to keep the domain.

If there is some way that I can get a feed of each of the 35 million new names each month, then i can have a script simply wget a couple of pages off each site from each of a few IP addresses.

That way they'll think they've hit paydirt, pay to keep the domain and suddenly realise that it doesn't get any hits.

I would imagine that automated counter-measures could really screw with their cost benifit analysis.

Re:WTF???

[Pecisk]

Damn, it is so "cool" see such insightful post on Slashdot. What we lack in virtual internet world - even here - is descent criticism of Capitalism just because if you are against it, you are probably hippy/anarchy lover/communist/peace of croak. Which actually shows that people are not ready to discuss many things, if they are connected with even small slice of disappointment or embarrassment (such that Communism was used as ideology to create and rule Soviet Union).

About proportionality you are talking about - well, problem is that people are people. Capitalism more or less is off-spring of Feodalism, so it simply slips back now. In my really humble opinion, people, left unchecked, will fuck up any system meant for common good. Why? Because of survival instincts. Like it or not, more money, more power is more chance for survival to most of the people. So they thrive for it. Why most people who are happy in marriage/with another significant one mostly don't care about these two things too much? Because they see their - or more concretely, survival of their species - in their family, children, etc. Yes, they need money too, but usually they have enough.

IMHO, behind all those greedy, power hungry bastards, system gamers you could see people which just have been very unlucky in their conquest of founding of their future and "survival" - happy family and children.

One big speculation, but those are my thoughts.

p.s. My biggest problem with modern world is that we keep telling "alternative truth" about it. We just close our eyes and keep saying what we want to hear. Not truth. We don't like admit that we are a little bit...savages.

Re:WTF???

[notlisted]

Which is under assault by mass domain registrations and re-registrations. The very topic of the Slashdot article. Or do you imagine that those DNS zone databases, which are now heading towards 90% spam contents, reside on a magical cloud and update by magic? Not to mention that cost-free, completely magical little winged fairies are involved in retrieving useful data out of heaps of spam every milisecond of every day, no?

Obviously you're still not getting how this works. No.. it's not little fairies that are involved in updating and maintaining the zone files.. Nor is it a magical community of poor, overworked volunteers. For ".com" DNS it's Verisign. The DNS system is only communal at the root level. You run a query for any .com domain and the root servers are going to refer to you VeriSign's DNS servers. The root servers do not have to handle all the updates for these domains being tasted, they only have to know where to refer any ".com" query too. VeriSign, as part of being the contracted registrar for ".com" is responsible for the cost of maintaining the QoS for the ".com" DNS systems and all these associated updates.. and it's VeriSign that profits from these "tasters". The reality is that VeriSign makes enough of the tasters/squatters that it's worth it to them to deal with the associated DNS load. In fact, they've even managed to play both sides of the fence on this issue by using the increased domain load [verisign.com] to justify a price increase [verisign.com]. If VeriSign was ever in danger of losing money because of domain loads I'm certain they'd be whining very loudly to ICANN.

Also I would like you to explain to me the benefit to the society the squatters represent. Focus your effort particularly on the wonderfully stimulating and helpful extortion applied by the squatters to any legitimate startup company wishing to register their new domain.

I never tried to claim that tasters/squatter represent any social value.. I just hate seeing people take moral high ground on incorrect assumptions of "how things work".

Re:Well maybe its *GASP* Time for Reform

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be just as effective to increase the cost of registration with the number of existing registrations? I'm not sure you need to monitor the content at all. I wonder how the number of registered domains differs between squatters and non-squatters.

Just make it cost-prohibitive to own large numbers of domains. That, plus getting rid of trial periods, and allowing existing owners grace periods after expiration, should probably cut down on a lot of this.

Re:I had not heard of the "testing" period.

[shmlco]

No leasing, no tasting, and price a .com domain somewhere from $100 to $1,000 a year to register and maintain. No automated renewals. Registrants need to have a valid address and email address, and be validated similar to what occurs when you try to get a SSL certificate.

And no squating. If you sitting on that domain name primarily to offer it for sale then it returns to the pool. No parking. No ad/link farms. If you have address.com and you went out of business then you went out of business. Sorry.

This is why we have Flickr, and Digg, and all of those other "mispelled" domain names. All single words are used up. All three and four and most five letter acronyms are gone. Double-word combinations are getting there. Common words with i or my are few and far between.

A friend tried to get a .org domain for an open-source project, only to find some company squatting on it, and offering to sell it for $3K. Shouldn't be legal. Names are a finite public resource and, when, no longer needed or abandoned, should be returned to the pool to be reregistered and reused.

Re:WTF???

[IgnoramusMaximus]

It is actually better for a country if the wealth is transfered to the most capable members of society, because, as they are more capable, they do a better job of generating new wealth from that money.

The problem, which you obviously have missed from my previous post, is that there appears to be no relationship between the transferring and the "capability".

This is one of the reasons why productivity growth in the US is so much higher than Europe, the wealth is distributed to individuals more by merit in the US.

This of course is one of the funnier non-sequiturs. An ultimately "productive" worker is one which operates fully-automated, 100% efficient factory which employs exactly zero other employees. Furthermore, an ultimately efficient enterprise (owned by that last Capitalist who now nears 99% of ownership of everything if current trends continue) would promptly fire that last worker and replace him with more automation. Ponder that when you espouse virtues of "productivity" and "efficiency".

The point of societies is not efficiency. It is happiness of its members. There is no race to be won by being more "efficient" then the some other lifeform on Pluto. But our lives are short and filled with problems and pain in no small part because of the fact that some people managed to pervert the society to put precedence of "efficiency" ahead of well being of the majority of its members for the sake of stroking egos and enriching very few of them.

In the long run the discrepancy in salaries is more than made up for by the increased growth rate, and so it is better for all members of society, including those in the lower brackets.

That green little man on Pluto must be getting ahead because you are concerned about how fast we "grow" our output of plastic lawn chairs from China and other worthless crap, while creating completely unsustainable energy and environmental (not to mention social and financial) nightmare so that we can outpace his "growth". Why else would you and the other nutcases be concerned with increasing the growth rate as opposed to general well being of individuals? USA is "growing" faster then Europe and yet there are 40 million medically uninsured people here to ... zero in Europe or Canada. What the fuck is the point of all this growth then?!!