Domain Tasting Goes Sour: ICANN Will No Longer Issue Registration Refunds
During a special meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors a resolution was passed which will end domain tasting as we know it. The discussion was sparked in response to the scandalous practice of Network Solutions hijacking domain searches in recent weeks. Oddly enough, the industry can be thankful to Net Sol for getting the snowball rolling on the end of domain tasting.
Grace Period Abuse Leads to the End
In this preliminary report, you will see the acronym AGP thrown around alot. AGP stands for “Add Grace Period” an idea initially created to reimburse domain registrants for names they accidentally registered or miss-typed.
The official resolution states, “The practice of ‘domain tasting,’ by which names are registered and then deleted during the AGP, has grown at a very great rate since 2005, with tens of millions of domains registered and deleted each month.”
And the kicker… “The Board believes that the withdrawal of ICANN’s waiver of ICANN’s non-refundable transaction fee to the deletion of names within the AGP will substantially end the practice of abusing the AGP.”
A voice vote was taken of all Board Members present and the motion was approved by a vote of 13-0.
What does this mean for the domaining industry?
This change in policy will improve many aspects of domaining in general;
- The typo-squatting business will plummet as domain tasting is somewhat essential for profitable typo choices.
- Expired domain after-market will thrive as lists begin to be “cleansed” from these bogus tasted names.
- Pay-Per-Click parking services may become more reputable as domains will be long standing and garner targeted traffic.
- Registrars will become more credible down the road, because in many cases they themselves were the biggest players in domain tasting.
- Domainers will not have to worry about companies stealing WHOIS search data.
It is not certain when this change will begin to take effect, but sources reveal it may be within a month.
What are your thoughts on this revolutionary news?
Popularity: 100% [?]
January 29th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Hallelujah! Your five changes spelled it out perfectly.
January 29th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
About time too! The huge drain on the domain industry caused by tasting could finally be at an end. And the biggest winner is the regular internet user, who will not find themselves landing on inappropriate pages of advertising so often any more. This can only improve the quality of the internet experience for everyone.
January 29th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
It’s about time something like this happened. This, however, may not be forced by what NetSol did, but rather because of the controversy that has been created by demands to pass control from US-owned ICANN to UN-owned body. In light of this possible change ICANN will (at least it should) do its best to please customers.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
[…] Is About To End Written by Zealus on January 29, 2008 – 8:14 pm - As is was outlined in DotSauce post today - ICANN may be about to put an end to the domain tasting as we know it. The positive outcome […]
January 29th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Bare minimum, this can make domain tasting more cost-prohibitive than financially rewarding. Time will tell if it’ll help eliminate domain tasting entirely.
Next questions will be how soon ICANN turns this into reality, and how VeriSign will react.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:17 am
[…] quite a bit of controversy among domainers and it looks like ICANN has decided to put a stop to it. This is awesome news for domainers, like myself, looking to make an honest living from investing and/or […]
January 30th, 2008 at 4:41 am
[…] brought to my attention yesterday by DotSauce, ICANN’s Board of Directors held a special meeting on January 23rd. During this meeting, the […]
January 30th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Actually,
These changes will not have much effect on domain tasting, but rather on domain kiting.
Domain tasting is practiced by people who want to see whether a domain is worth buying… the cost of $7 for tasting a domain is not that bad if it’s offset by anything over $7 in earnings.
Domain kiting on the other hand, the practice of chain tasting a domain - registering for 4 days, dropping it, then re-registering it and so on - will be affected since each taste costs $7.
John
January 30th, 2008 at 9:40 am
[…] now, ICANN has decided to not allow a grace period on transaction fee refunds, and that is likely the last nail in the domain tasting coffin. This should also end NetSol’s […]
January 30th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Very interesting how this will effect the Industry. I first heard about this from a friend of mine at oversee.net- I believe they just acquired SnapNames recently. Good for them.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
About time it happened!
January 30th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
URL Hijackers must be hurting right about now, ha! This is great news, the cleansing is welcomed.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
[…] Domain Tasting Goes Sour: ICANN Will No Longer Issue Registration Refunds And the kicker… “The Board believes that the withdrawal of ICANN’s waiver of ICANN’s non-refundable transaction fee to the deletion of names within the AGP will substantially end the practice of abusing the AGP.” (tags: ICANN) […]
January 31st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I think this is a good thing!
January 31st, 2008 at 7:47 pm
[…] ICANN va en contra de la prueba de dominios. Yeah!!! […]
January 31st, 2008 at 7:58 pm
[…] glad to hear that ICANN is finally going to stop domain tasting and front-running. It really does put the small […]
January 31st, 2008 at 11:49 pm
[…] NetworkSolutions Scandal: Hijacking User Domain Searches UPDATE: Our voices have been heard! The ICANN Board of Directors a resolution was passed which will end domain tasting as we know it, including this Network Solutions scandal. Read the full story here on DotSauce. […]
February 1st, 2008 at 1:53 am
seems like a good idea
but how do they stop people registering domains and exit without paying when there is a paypal gateway, and come back after few days if the domain sounds good
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Maybe I read the report wrong, but I got the impression that the fee for deletion was only going to be 20 or 30 cents. If that is indeed the case, it is way too little, way too late.
See http://www.icann.org/minutes/prelim-report-23jan08.htm
February 3rd, 2008 at 4:59 am
[…] this was discovered and verified, the ICANN decided to drop the 5 day grace period. That’s good news, since it will make domain squatting less economically […]
February 6th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I think its for the best.
February 6th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
They virtually can’t. The next best thing is to possibly make it more cost-prohibitive.
February 7th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
[…] Domain Tasting Goes Sour: ICANN Will No Longer Issue Registration Refunds - A week or so ago Network Solutions made world news because of their 5 day refund scandal. I’m not exactly sure if the new ICANN changes will affect them much, if at all… we can only hope. […]
February 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Domain tasting is practiced by people who want to see whether a domain is worth buying… the cost of $7 for tasting a domain is not that bad if it’s offset by anything over $7 in earnings.
February 8th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Domain tasting can be used for numerous purposes, including cashing in on the spammers: last year some big-time spammers were heavily link spamming domains before buying them. The company I worked for began setting up numerous honeypots to capture the the names of the unregsitered domains and set up a contexual-ad-based landing pages and cash in on a few days of traffic. Considering they were ‘tasting’ a few hundred thousand domains per week, it became very profitable.
February 9th, 2008 at 3:32 am
I just stumbled upon your website and I feel it is an outstanding resource!
Continue to post quality material, I plan on continuing to read.
cheers!
scott
February 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I’m absolutely floored by this. Hope it happens - Domain squatters make my life a living hell.
February 11th, 2008 at 1:50 am
I think this is a good thing, especially since it will slow down companies from stealing WhoIS info. I know I’ve received several mailings from people whom I’ve never heard of before and sat there wondering how these people were even getting my info in the first place.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Thank God, What a scam tasting is. I can’t stand seeing the sames names showing up over and over in my daily deleted names lists. Power to the little people.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:18 am
I think domain tasting is absurd and I’m glad they’ve done this. For some reason I just do not like the fact that people buy domains up in the thousands with no intent on using them in a real way. I’m happy to hear the news, but is it too little too late?
February 12th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Hearing this is like music to my ears. Thank Net Solutions for making this happen and damaging your business reputation in the process of it all.
I can WHOIS again without the fear of my secretive domain being taken
- Dwayne Charrington.
http://www.dwaynecharrington.com
February 14th, 2008 at 4:40 am
Hasn’t slowed Net Sol down. Just checked and they are still doing it
February 15th, 2008 at 1:19 am
This is great news. It seems like lately search engines have been full of ppc ads that lead to parked pages. I saw a ppc ad the other day for “Mitt Romney’s Underwear” which lead to a parked domain that had those keywords in it.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I didn’t know about domain tasting for the longest time, but now that I know about it, I am glad that it is being taken care of. Now I’d like to see what’s going to be happening with all this parked domain stuff.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:57 am
[…] a few weeks later the incident was taken care of by ICANN Board of Directors passing a resolution ending domain tasting in response to the […]
February 20th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Well the domainers will anyways don’t have to worry abt their privacy related issues and individuals or companies stealing their whois data, as long as they have privacy protection cover with whatever domain names they register
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I did not know a thing about any of this until today. I was shopping around different registrars to check their prices and I happened upon Network Solutions. Now my domain has been snapped up and I’d be willing to bet that it will be sold off to a taster.
I’m pissed and this happened today (2/22/09) - I don’t think ICANN has or really will do anything about this.
February 25th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
ICANN stopped Nothing Network Solutions has still been registering domains looked up in their Whois as of today February 25th 2008!
March 4th, 2008 at 10:14 am
they are still kidnapping the domains looked up as of March 2, 2008. ICANN stopped NOTHING. I am pissed of that nothing and nobody can do about this? even if they claimed that we could contact the 1-800 number to get quick release of the hold, that just doesn’t make sense, should any non-resident of the country make an international call for requesting a release for such kidnapping of the domain name? the NS really stands for Non-Sense.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Yes, this is a huge relief.. especaially network solutions were makinga lot of visitors who used their search option angry.. good choice
March 12th, 2008 at 10:49 am
As of March 12, 2008, Network Solutions is still doing it.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
ICANN’s news site says the change must be approved at their summer meeting, darn:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-29jan08.htm
April 6th, 2008 at 9:25 am
This happened to me as well! I was about to register ouratelier.com last february (was just waiting for my paypal funds) when i found out that they suddenly registered it! im soo mad
April 27th, 2008 at 2:39 am
I’ve just whois a domain in network solutions and it says the domain is available. after an hour or two i decided to have it registered to godaddy.com and look what i found. networksolutions had it registered on the very moment i queried that domain.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:45 am
This is great news! It drives me mad that people swoop up soooo many domains without any real intention of using them. I’ve come across quite a few taken domains, then realized they were never going to be used in the first place.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:46 am
Isn’t Network Solutions still doing this?
April 30th, 2008 at 3:47 am
“Domainers will not have to worry about companies stealing WHOIS search data.”
This really hits home with me! I had a terrible expeience with this in the past.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
may 29, 2008 , NS are still doing it, i searched a domain name on NS, and instantly it was hijacked by NS. I tried to register on namecheap.com within 1 or 2 minutes, but it showed as ‘taken’. I searched on NS and it was ‘available’. I did a whois on it, and it was registered by network solutions.
June 6th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Well, so much for ICANN putting a stop to Network Solutions thievery. This article was posted on 1/29/2008 and NS is still hijacking domain names. Its just plain despicable!
June 9th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Network solutions is a scam, I stoped using it a while now. It is really not cool, what they do with the domains. The best way to go is pre-owned domains, at least in my oppinion.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I work at Network Solutions. I’m not sure I agree with the term scandalous, and I think the issue is a lot more complicated than this, including domain tasting policies and corresponding abuse.
We know how important this issue is for everyone, and not only did we listen to you and your commenters, we’re acting.
Next week ICANN can vote on an important issue to resolve to resolve front running for once and for all. Network Solutions is advocating that ICANN acts now, and we have published an official statement on our web site to that end.
Please excuse this URL, but given the seriousness of this issue, it was appropriate to provide a link: http://tinyurl.com/63yaox
Shashi
June 25th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
it seems like a good idea, but my concern is similar as to SeoContest2008. How do they stop people registering domains and exit without paying.
This is a good resource. Will be looking forward for more quality post like this.