ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting 137
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."
Network Solutions (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
Fantastic (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Network Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Network Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
Normally you use whois (which exists as a commandline tool), but you can also use DNS, for example
Of course, you have to trust the organisation that's at the other end of your query. It is possible that some domain owners count DNS requests. There are fewer organisations that manage the Whois database.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:Don't worry about the name (Score:3, Interesting)
Often you can't. The product already exists, or the family isn't willing to change its surname just because of your domain-name suggestions.
For example, if I ever wanted to make my game (see below) commercial, then battlemaster.com would be the obvious website. Except that it's been an "under construction", "coming soon" links/ads/search site, and has been like that for years. There's even advertisement for the "free domain name registration" (aka tasting) in the fucking WHOIS entry.
So I'll have to change the name that all my players are used to, or use a not-so-obvious one instead, even though nobody is using the one that I could use.
And that's why, refering to another comment, just 3.5 mio. honest registrations a years is a log better than 51 mio. "tastings" and 3.5 mio. honest ones.
Exploit the exploiters (Score:3, Interesting)
If I were someone who loses a legitimate domain name I wanted to register to such fraud, I'd go to court and demonstrate how NSI systematically abuses its power of being able to register domains for free in order to force people to register domains through them. I'm sure even if it's not extortion, it's anti-competitive at least...
Re:They could deal with an actual problem instead. (Score:3, Interesting)
That is a valid point, certainly. However, for many of the criminals, there are some obvious patterns involved. In particular, the criminals generally purchase several dozen (or more?) domains in a single day. If you are aware of a good reason why a legitimate business or individual would want to do such a thing, I'm interested in hearing it.
Second, many of these criminals do keep the same name and registration data as they move from one registrar to another. For example, "Leo Kuvayev" has been using the alias "Alex Rodrigez" (note the spelling) for several years now. And over the past three registrars, he as always claimed to live in Lappeenranta, Finland.
So if the registrar started by taking notice of the red flag that should come up when someone registers a large number of domains with very different names, and then they took 5 seconds to do a google search on the contact data, they'd see that they are selling to a known criminal.
ICANN does state that the registrars are obligated to keep valid WHOIS records [internic.net] on the domains they sell. And it really isn't that hard for them to check against publicly available data on their customers when they get unusual requests.
I'm even willing to concede that they shouldn't be expected to check every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane that buys a domain. When I've checked the WHOIS records of the spamvertised domains that I see, I would say that over 80% of spamvertised domains are registered to less than 5% of all spamvertised domain registrants, and through less than 2% of all accredited registrars. If the registrars were at least held accountable to check the data on their customers that make unusually large purchases, we could do a lot to stem the current problem.
Re:They could deal with an actual problem instead. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Network Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)