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The Internet

ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting 137

Posted by kdawson 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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ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting More

ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting

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  • KISS (Score:5, Funny)

    by Amorymeltzer ( 1213818 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:11AM (#22233332)
    Good.

    (all other posts after this are either wrong or repeating)

    • Re:KISS (Score:5, Funny)

      by EveryNickIsTaken ( 1054794 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:15AM (#22233370)
      Actually, IMO, KISS was highly overrated. Gene Simmons is a marketing genius, though.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Pikoro ( 844299 )
      Mod parent up and lock comments on this story. Enough said...

    • FIRE (Score:1, Funny)

      by wezeldog ( 982156 )
      Bad!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      At the same meeting they also discussed Network Solutions' front running but took no action on it.

      You think anybody who doesn't find this "good" is wrong?

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        We could also add a "Bad" comment to appease the contrarians, and then this story would only need two comments.

      • That doesn't matter now, because they'll stop. Like hell they're going to automate a process that costs money and isn't easily reversible.

    • Overall a great decision, but . . . (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MisterSquid ( 231834 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @10:34AM (#22234582)
      Along with many others, I deplored Network Solutions' preemptive domain registration which took advantage of domain tasting. However as a former beneficiary of the present domain tasting policy, I can see at least one benefit to consumers (and businesses) that gets overlooked because of the audacity of Network Solutions' behavior.

      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)

        by SnapShot ( 171582 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @11:25AM (#22235134)
        I understand your anecdote, but considering that a domain name only costs $9 I'm still on the side of banning the practice.

        ICANN says it pretty eloquently:

        Whereas, it is apparent that the AGP is being used for purposes for which it
        was not intended;

        Whereas, abuse of the AGP is, in the opinion of the majority of respondents
        whose statements were collected by the GNSO Ad Hoc Group on Domain Name
        Tasting (4 October 2007 report), producing disadvantages in the form of
        consumer confusion and potential fraud that outweigh the benefits of the
        AGP;


        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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by racyrefinedraj ( 981243 )
        Either we are talking about different "Pirogis," or you still don't have the right transliteration: Pierogi [wikipedia.org] Of course, the article does mention that you've got options: "(also perogi, perogy, pirohi, piroghi, pirogi, pirogen, piroshke or pyrohy)"

        • To be clear, "pirogi" was only an example. The translated word was a different type of food.

          But as long as we're on the topic, my dead tree copy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary specifies (not sure of Slashcode will take care of the entity references properly)

          pirogi \p-'r-g\ n, pl -gi or -gies [Pol] (1927) : PIROSHIKI

          Now, if it's not to much trouble, please allow me to say, GET OFF MY LAWN!

          darn whippersnappers . . .

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fermion ( 181285 )
        To me tasting is a relic of a past time, specifcally when registering a domain was a significant expenditure of time and money.

        Now that domains are cheap and easy, there is no reason to have a trail period. It is like having a trial period box of candy or some other trivial consumable. Sure, if the product is defective the retailer will take it back, but otherwise you made the choice, you keep the product. This kind of return policy is disruptive to consumers and retailers.

        Speaking directly to your c

      • Remember the grief Dan Quayle got a few years ago when he spelled it "potatoe" at a spelling bee? "Accepted" spellings change quite often. Both my parents learned "potatoe" and "tomatoe", but I learned it with no E at the end. (I don't know *why* that particular spelling changed, but it's a well-known example.)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Neanderthal Ninny ( 1153369 )
      Ditto.
      It is the spammers, phishers and other malware makers that abuse the "tasting" of the domains. They take the domain and then spam, phish and other junk at you then when you finally have can check and have law enforcement to go after them then they disappear with the "tasted" domain. Also the "tasted" domain is also on every blacklist in the world so when someone tries to use that domain "tasted" you can't do anything with it since it is blacklisted.
      Like anything the in the world, some people abuse som

  • Network Solutions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kagura ( 843695 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:14AM (#22233360)
    Network Solutions recently released a comment on their supposedly unscrupulous business practices [circleid.com]. They claim that their automatic registration of domain names that were searched for was an effort to stem the problem of domain tasters. I have a hard time believing that.

    • Re:Network Solutions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tritonman ( 998572 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:18AM (#22233392)
      Yea I think they are full of crap. I tried this myself, I searched on network solutions for some random domain name like kljihsd2342.com, it said it was available, then I decided that I would maybe go with register.com (we do have freedom of choice right?) and it said the domain was unavailable, it was registered by network solutions. This is most certainly abuse of power.

      • Re:Network Solutions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by badfish99 ( 826052 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:28AM (#22233464)
        So the solution is simply to do your searches on register.com if you're going to buy from them, and not to go to networksolutions.com at all.

        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)

          by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
          Well what if you don't intend to register but just want to see if the domain is available. Without restrictions against the likes of NetworkSolutions, Register.com could do the exact same thing, and the whole registration process would go downhill really fast. Couldn't you just do a DNS request to see if a domain is taken? Is it a requirement that if you have registered a domain, to have a DNS server?

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by hankwang ( 413283 ) *

            Couldn't you just do a DNS request to see if a domain is taken?

            Normally you use whois (which exists as a commandline tool), but you can also use DNS, for example

            dig example.com (*ux)
            nslookup -type=ns example.com (works with Windows)

            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.

          • Re:Network Solutions (Score:4, Informative)

            by julesh ( 229690 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @10:12AM (#22234360)
            Couldn't you just do a DNS request to see if a domain is taken?

            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: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 )

            Couldn't you just do a DNS request to see if a domain is taken?

            Yes. IIRC, Network Solutions would not snipe the results of whois lookups/DNS failed lookups of domains, only the domains that you searched for as the first step of registering it.

            I actually see nothing wrong with letting a company reserve a domain for a short period of time to allow the transaction process to complete or allow the choice of several domains to be elevated. But 1 hour would work for that.

        • I always kinda liked the idea of having the registrars charge a small amount for the sites which they "taste." Not enough to have make it impact overall prices for those that aren't pulling a network solutions style ripoff, but enough that companies like NS end up paying out if they decide to try and hold potentially desirable domains for ransom.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Now that is freaky.

        networksolutionsuckhorsecocks.com is available.

        Then I go to register.com and it isn't.

        Crazy, crazy world...
      • I don't know US law, but I'm pretty sure this is illegal in one way or another.

        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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by initialE ( 758110 )
        When domain tasting was available, the solution was simple - buy the domain, even before you decide you want it, even if it means buying several to see which one you want. It costs you nothing after all, and you can release the ones you don't want. Everyone here complains about searching for a domain before they buy it. You're not supposed to do that, you need to buy it immediately, then let go of it if you decided it wasn't the one you wanted.
    • I expected that the domain saving thing was actually them holding the domain while a customer decided if they wanted to buy it nor not, so it couldn't be registered while they're still entering card details or whatever. It is a bit dodgy, though - were they actually putting adverts up on the domains?

    • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 )

      They claim that their automatic registration of domain names that were searched for was an effort to stem the problem of domain tasters.
      My brothers doing bad, stole my mothers TV
      Says she watches too much, it's just not healthy

    • I think their solution amounts to, "If anyone's going to be making money off of domain tasting, it's us."

    • Re:Network Solutions (Score:4, Informative)

      by morcego ( 260031 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @09:23AM (#22233912)
      Humm, please correct if I'm wrong, but doesn't getting rid of domain tasting pretty much stops NSI from doing this front running scheme ?

      • MOD PARENT UP!

        More to the point, as soon as there's no free taste capability, every domain they ninja on the basis of an availability query costs them money!.

        Which means the automated query-NS-with-random-crap-domains that many folks suggested [slashdot.org] will actually hurt NS where they feel it: in the wallet.

        I urge my fellow slashwarriors: keep up the automated random pointless availability queries. The moment NS can't abuse their position with impunity, they'll stop doing it or the slash-hordes zerging their WHOIS

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by macdaddy ( 38372 )
      You mean it's an effort to stem the problem of other domain tasters, not the domain taster called NSI.
    • That reminded me to go search about 50 domain names (all, um, formerly available) with Network Solutions so that they could taste some more.

      I don't know why that makes me happy.

      DT

  • Is this really about domain tasting (Score:5, Informative)

    by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:18AM (#22233384) Homepage Journal
    Or domain kiting? In tasting, customers register the domain for 5 days and use that up and then let it expire. In kiting, they delete the domain before the grace period is up and then re-register for another 5 day grace for the same domain.

  • Where's the tag? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:21AM (#22233406)
    I expected to see a 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense' tag on this one, but maybe I saw it before it had time to be tagged.

    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.
  • I always thought it was a bit of an obvious loop-hole. Good to see that Google's stance appears to have forced a good decision from ICANN.

    I don't even know why they have that grace period. AFAIK .uk domains don't have one - every registrar I've bothered reading the FAQ for basically says "you typed it wrong? Then tough luck, we gave you an 'are you sure the details are right' page".

    If only there was a way to cut down on pointlessly parked domains that turn up high in search results...

    • Impact on registrars like GoDaddy? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by StringBlade ( 557322 ) * on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:52AM (#22233624) Journal

      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: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by ps236 ( 965675 )
        Why have domain tasting at all?

        How many people really make a mistake? If you buy something from your local shop and then decide you didn't want it after all, the shop has no obligation to give you your money back - especially if they suspect you have used it (eg if it's clothes, a camera etc)

        A domain costs virtually nothing to register, and they're not vital for people to live. So, if you screw up and register the wrong domain, tough, it's your fault, not the registrar's, not the rest of the world's. You sh
        • Domain tasting is for companies, so the marketing department can pick out a dozen potential domains and present them to the high muckety-mucks without worrying that someone else might come along and buy one.

      • Re:Impact on registrars like GoDaddy? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by IBBoard ( 1128019 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @09:29AM (#22233978) Homepage

        GoDaddy.com who (according to Wikipedia) have 55.1 million domain names registered a year of which 51.5 million are canceled and refunded

        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.

        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.

        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 .uk domains, so it can happen with .coms. NIC.uk's FAQ page [www.nic.uk] doesn't even have any reference to returning a domain.
        • Godaddy also provides web hosting and dedicated server hosting. I personally have two dedicated servers there because they are very cheap (a little over $100 a month) yet also very responsive when I need help. I don't know how big a percentage of their business is hosting and how much is domain names, but it's not like domain names are the only thing they do.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by jafiwam ( 310805 )
        In other words, most of their registrations comes from SCAMMING, and if not illegal but unethical activities.

        And you want me to have SYMPATHY for them?

        How bout this, fuck you, and fuck GoDaddy. The only thing they ever did right was hire that chick with the big tits for the SuperBowl commercials.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by esper ( 11644 )
        Everyone around here seems to agree that we need to fix broken copyright laws and, if fixing the rules ruins the RIAA/MPAA's business model, then that's their problem for clinging to a model which depends on those broken laws.

        Seems to me that the exact same argument should apply here. If ICANN does something to put a stop to domain tasting/kiting, then that's a good thing for the net as a whole and if GoDaddy can't update their business model to handle the change, well, then I guess they can join the buggy

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by James_G ( 71902 )
        Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, has been talking about this problem since 2004. You can read his thoughts [bobparsons.com] on it, and see a letter sent to ICANN in 2004 here [godaddy.com].

        The point being, they're fully in favour of an end to "tasting" and have been calling for it for ~3 years.
  • Is domain tasting really the most important problem that ICANN could sink its teeth into?

    I say no.

    ICANN has the role of accreditation of domain name registrars themselves (particularly for .com, .net, .org, .info domains). But yet they chose to remain toothless in all but the most very extreme cases of bad registrar services.

    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.

    • Why they continue to neglect the opportunity to do so is beyond me.
      Well, as they always say, follow the money.

      If pacnames, yesnic and mouzz are getting kickbacks from the criminals, maybe they are sending a cut to ICANN.

      • If pacnames, yesnic and mouzz are getting kickbacks from the criminals, maybe they are sending a cut to ICANN.

        That is an interesting question to raise. Honestly, I have always hoped that the problem with ICANN was due to incompetence rather than corruption.

        Frankly, the more cynical side of me should have considered that possibility long ago. For some reason the optimist was in charge of that decision instead...

        And on a side note, I can't help but wonder who the wise-ass is that modded your post "funny". If I had mod points today (and wasn't posting in this thread already) I'd have given it "insightful".

    • Do any registrars check any data you give them that is not required to process your payment? As far as I know, none of them do criminal back ground checks, or require your information to be accurate.

      • Do any registrars check any data you give them that is not required to process your payment? As far as I know, none of them do criminal back ground checks, or require your information to be accurate.

        Well, ICANN does require that registrars maintain accurate WHOIS data so that the domain owners can be contacted.

        Payment processing is an interesting question in and of itself, as well. I would suspect that someone with extensive criminal connections (such as Leo Kuvayev) probably wouldn't have much difficulty getting credit cards that correspond to any name and location he likes. And if that is how we wanted to make his payment, then it would be easy to skate by on just enough data to process the

        • Is there a newsletter the registrar's get every moth with names of know criminals? I don't know who they would get this information. I'm sure its out there but how easy is it to collect all of this information?

          Plus if you do have this list of known criminals that should not be able to register domain names, how do you allow someone else with a similar name to? First and Last Name combo's are not unique. Just take a look at all of the problems we've had with false positives for the No fly list. If I was o

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by damn_registrars ( 1103043 )

            I don't know who they would get this information.

            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 usi

      • Given that virtually all domain registrations are instant, I'd say no. The only exception I'm aware of is .travel, which is a real pain in the arse to register under.

        The .au space is pretty tightly governed. For example, for a .com.au you need to be an Australian registered business and provide your Australian Business Number or similar identification; and the domain name needs to either be close or exact match for your business name or "substantially related".

        I'm pretty sure it used to be that registra

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by gmack ( 197796 )
          The downside to this is that .com needs to be international and some countries have pretty strange looking addresses. I had a customer have his domain disabled every year when someone would look at the address (roughly translated as three houses over from the post office) and disable the domain for having a fake address even though the customer was getting mail at that address.

        • The .au space is pretty tightly governed. For example, for a .com.au you need to be an Australian registered business and provide your Australian Business Number or similar identification; and the domain name needs to either be close or exact match for your business name or "substantially related".

          Well, in theory, anyway. In reality, if you had the money and were a big enough name, you could get any .com.au regardless of 'genericity', etc., whereas the small time .com.au company would often have to go thr

          • Isn't news.com.au owned by News Corp? Sounds fairly similar...
            • It is. And in general, I could live with that, but I'll give you the example at the time that utterly fucked me off.

              I worked for a company, with a generic-ish name, we'll say, for anonymity's sake, "Streetlamp Solutions". We tried to register streetlamp.com.au - no dice - "too generic". We ended up going with streetlampsolutions.com.au. Fine.

              News? isn't generic? How come they weren't pushed to register newscorp.com.au? I'm sure any other news/paper/media source in Australia would have killed for that doma

    • They could deal with an actual problem instead...
      Domain tasting is an actual problem, a very big one, and it's good they are doing something about it. Give credit where credit is due.

  • Fantastic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ps236 ( 965675 )
    Now, we just need all the rest of the ccTLD registries to do the same, and spammers' lives will get that little bit harder.

  • What is interesting to me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bleh-of-the-huns ( 17740 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:29AM (#22233468)
    Is the fact that last night I was searching for a sprayfoam insulation company in maryland (using google), and the very first link that came up, was a domain taster domain registered 3 days prior to yesterday, that only had ads and click through sites on it...

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )
      Did you look up the domain registration? It might not be a tasting site. If they sold enough ads during the tasting period, then they would have registered it for real.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by esper ( 11644 )
        Considering the GP said it "was a domain taster domain registered 3 days prior to yesterday ", I'd say that, yes, he probably did look it up.

  • cyber squatters (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tusaki ( 252769 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:40AM (#22233550)
    Its a good move, but im still waiting to see some more action against domain squatters. It is so infuriating to have a good idea for a website, only to have 99% of the possible/good domain names being taken and being part of some advertizement network. And I just refuse to pay them.

    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)

      by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @09:17AM (#22233848)
      It is so infuriating to have a good idea for a website, only to have 99% of the possible/good domain names being taken and being part of some advertizement network.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tusaki ( 252769 )
        Not that I've actually checked, but it wouldn't surprise me if nearly all phonetically good sounding memorable names are squatted. Especially when sites with names like "flickr" got popular and domain squatters started paying attention to sites like that.

        And even if you dont "need" a good name, it shouldn't be possible to make money of it this way. Its just.. wrong... in my eyes. Making money of typos of people or making money of random dictionary words without content is evil.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tom ( 822 )
        If you can invent a name, that's great.

        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 fucki
        • You already have battlemaster.org, why would you bother with a .com?

          In case you haven't noticed, tons of .org sites are for-profit. For instance, the one I'm posting on right now.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tom ( 822 )
            Mostly because I'm old and I still believe in TLDs meaning something. I expect a .org to be a non-profit, a .net to have something to do with networks, and so on. If I were to go commercial, I'd use a .com simply because I feel like that's the honest thing to do.
            • I'm old too. My first domain was my last name .net. (I wasn't a non-profit, I wasn't a company, not educational or military, .name didn't exist yet... what was I supposed to use? Hah.) But if ICANN doesn't care and, in fact, nobody cares, why should you?

              Hell, make it a .co.uk-- people think British accents are sophisticated, right?
        • You could always rename the game to "Smoked Meats and Fishes Master". I hear that one's available.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sootman ( 158191 )
        If you have a good idea for a website, pick a unique, memorable name, not an obvious one.

        Thanks, but not everyone is interested in creating a memorable brand. 'ebay' and 'amazon' are only memorable because they're famous. (More on this below.)

        Nothing, it doesn't matter, most people are going to find your website through Google anyway rather than typing in a URL.

        Have you actually tried that? Search google for 'auction' and auction.com comes up first, ebay second. Searching Google for 'books' leads to Google
        • Thanks, but not everyone is interested in creating a memorable brand.

          Yes you are, just because you're not selling something doesn't mean you're not "branding" your site. Otherwise you could save yourself some money and just use your IP address.

          Have you actually tried that? Search google for 'auction' and auction.com comes up first, ebay second. Searching Google for 'books' leads to Google Book search, Barnes & Noble, the NY Times book reviews, fucking SALON.COM's books area (and by the way, salon.com

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sootman ( 158191 )
            >> Thanks, but not everyone is interested in creating a memorable brand.

            > Yes you are, just because you're not selling something doesn't mean you're
            > not "branding" your site. Otherwise you could save yourself some money
            > and just use your IP address.

            Even so, shouldn't I at least have the ability to choose a generic name if I want? What is so wrong with having some general informatin about aspect ratios on a site called 'aspectratio.org' or 'aspectratio.info'? Why must I use some crappy name
            • Even so, shouldn't I at least have the ability to choose a generic name if I want? What is so wrong with having some general informatin about aspect ratios on a site called 'aspectratio.org' or 'aspectratio.info'? Why must I use some crappy name like 'aspect-ratio.org' (oh, how I LOVE saying 'dash' or 'hyphen' out loud when I'm talking to a human) or asprat.org (just sounds bad... almost like 'ass' plus 'brat')? Just because the name contains some of the original letters DOES NOT MAKE IT MORE MEMORABLE! Aga

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sootman ( 158191 )
                And I want to move back to the SF Bay Area, but houses there are too expensive. BUT--almost every house in the area that is owned is being lived in. I'm fine with that. If it's the best place to live in the country and that's why it's so expensive, that's fine. I'll deal with that. I'll learn to love Montana or Alaska.* But if 999 out of 1000 houses were owned by speculators, and all that perfectly gorgeous land were going to waste, that would be a shame. If aspectratio.org and aspectratio.info were both be
                • Does everything have to be a zero-sum game, a fight to the death, might-makes-right, winner-takes-all, pure-capitalism-roar-har?

                  Yup!

                  * and if I can't have aspect ratios or carbonated milk I'll learn to love caffeinated bacon or baconated grapefruit.

                  Why don't you just try some Admiral Crunch or Archduke Chocula?

  • ICANN says (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ranger ( 1783 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @08:55AM (#22233646) Homepage
    Don't taste me, bro!
  • I wonder how many of these 'domain tasters' are just registering domains to use in spam and phishing scams. Considering how often the URL changes on the spam I get (that is obviously from the same originator) I would imagine that's what they're doing. If that's the case, I expect the elimination of domain tasting to at least change the way spam is set up, perhaps making some of it easier to detect.

    In any case, domain tasting is a very antiquated system almost designed to be abused, and should have been drop

  • good move (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @10:24AM (#22234472) Homepage Journal
    One step back from the wrong direction they've been heading for years.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      TFA said they implemented this 'feature' for those who accidentally register a domain. (I assume that's for misspellings, etc.) They didn't forsee it being used like this. They came to the conclusion that the harm caused by tasting greatly outweighs the benefits of letting someone off the hook for a mistake.
  • Domains taste like chicken.
  • Eliminating the grace period also eliminates front-running. If you read the transcript, NSI had in fact indicated that they would roll back front-running if they lost the grace period.
  • So what is the best register to use for us UKians?

  • Expired domain zone settings (Score:3, Insightful)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @10:54AM (#22234788) Homepage Journal
    While I think this is great I have another gripe that I wish ICANN would address. We resell domains to our ISP customers. We had one expire yesterday which isn't that uncommon of an occurrence. We had sent the customer an email alerting to the impending expiration and they never acted and the domain expired. As expected they noticed the problem the next morning and now it's a big deal; they were no longer receiving email from their customers and email was mission critical to them (interesting considering that they couldn't be bothered to read an email from their Internet provider). We renewed the domain at about 11am. I told them that it would probably be about half a day before the NS change was pushed to the root servers and the cached records expired on their customers' NSs. This morning it is still apparently a problem. I checked one of our NSs and sure enough it still had the registrar's temporary NSs instead of the NSs we use for customer zones. I queried a few NSs of other providers and they had the right info. I flushed my cache and the records fixed themselves. My earlier dig that showed the wrong NSs also showed two TTL counters. At the time the counter on the NSs was at just under 14hrs. The other was just under 48hrs. The registrar apparently set the TTL value on the domain to somewhere between 24 and 72 hours.

    The significance of this may not be obvious to everyone so let me explain. The TTL (Time To Live) value is part of the SOA (Start of Authority) in a DNS zone file. The TTL value is how the administrator of the authoritative NS tells the client's DNS resolver to cache the DNS responses. Ie, if I lookup the MX for blah.com and the TTL is 300 then I will cache that response for 5 minutes and I'll use that cached response for any subsequent queries until the TTL expires. I won't bug you or waste your bandwidth until then. It's a way of reducing load on the authoritative NSs and keep from wasting bandwidth across the Internet for redundant queries (think of a caching HTTP proxy).

    The effect of the registrar's taking this step manifests itself when the domain gets renewed. The domain is renewed as soon as service is interrupted and the problem is discovered. The registrar submits updates to Verisign for the COM zone file twice a day. Depending on when the domain was renewed with respect to when the registrar sends the updates as well as the SOA values (that control caching) dictate how long it will be before the domain is functional again. The registrar, Spirit Domains, chose to set the TTL to something between 24 and 72 hours. That's 1-3 days for the math challenged among us. That's absurdly long. I contend that most renewals of expired domains happen within 1-12 hours of the expiration for domains that are actually used. Why any registrar would choose to use a TTL longer than an hour or two is beyond me. I can understand the concern of the load this would put on their NSs. The answer is simple though. For the first day set the TTL to 1hr. On the second day set the TTL to 6 hours. On day 3 set it to 12 hours. On day 7 set it to whatever you want. 98% of expired domains that are going to be renewed would surely be done within 3 days. That would keep the MTTR for the function of the domain down to a reasonable level. 24-72hrs is not a reasonable level.

    I called Spirit Domains to chew on them earlier this morning. The guy I spoke with said that he didn't know why that TTL value was chosen but that it was what they always used. He said it was definitely between 24 and 72 hours. That's horse shit. On top of that, in the temp zone they created also had a MX record. It was the MX record that had the extra high TTL of +48hrs. Even if the NS records expired in 24 hours the MX records would have still been cached and would have still been pointed at Spirit Domains SMTP blackhole: grey-area.mailhostingserver.com.

    In short I would like to see ICANN address the problem of what registrars put in their expired domain zone files. The TTLs should be kept low and increment slowly. Their should not be a MX record under any circumstances.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      0) I don't see why ICANN should do anything about this.

      1) If you don't like the TTLs Spirit Domains uses, you should take it up with them or switch to a registrar that uses TTLs you like.

      2) Why should your customer be using you for "domain name stuff"?

      After all, in this scenario what "value add" did you provide compared to if they had used a decent registrar?

      Registrars send warning emails too (at least Gandi did when I last let a domain name expire).

      I'm sure you can think of ways to do things better.

      By the
  • It's a good move, but... as with almost any bureaucracy, the reaction has come slowly. Lots of "profitable" domain names have already been permanently snatched from the namespace, and many more will surely be taken in the remaining days until the policy comes into effect. The change will protect any future lookups. However, I wonder what percentage of all currently registered domain names is registered thanks to this loophole. No such estimate?

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