Internet and e-mail policy and practice
including Notes on Internet E-mail


2008
Months
Dec

Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own.


Subscribe to this blog


RSS feed


Home :: ICANN

19 Dec 2008

ICANN sets the schedule to kill domain tasting ICANN

Domain tasting, as everyone probably knows by now, is the disreputable practice of registering lots of domains, seeing how much traffic they get, and then using the five day Add Grace Period (AGP) to refund the 99.9% of them that aren't worth paying for. A related abuse is front running, registrars speculatively grabbing domains that people inquire about to prevent them from using a different registrar.

Back in April, the ICANN GNSO (the subgroup that deals with generic TLDs, i.e., all but the two-letter country codes) voted to set a new policy to get rid of domain tasting. And now, eight short months later, it's finally about to become ICANN policy.

The new AGP Limits Policy is quite reasonable: a registrar can only refund 10% of its new registrations each month, with a small loophole for one-time screwups. Normal registrars refund 1% to 2% of their registrations, while tasters have been refunding close to 100%, so this should do the trick.

The new schedule says that registries should implement the new limits soon, and in no case later than March 31. I don't understand why it takes nearly a year to get from the GNSO resolution to implementation, but surely better late than never.

In parallel ICANN board made the 20 cent ICANN fee non-refundable beyond 10% of registrations, effective in the 2009 budget year which started in July. ICANN reports that in July refunds dropped by 84%.

Update: The original version of this article said that the 20 cent refund rule would start next July, not this July.


  posted at: 04:51 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/lasttaste.html

Topics


My other sites

Who is this guy?

Airline ticket info

Taughannock Networks

Other blogs

CAUCE
It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam.
4 days ago

A keen grasp of the obvious
Italian Apple Cake
562 days ago

Related sites

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

Network Abuse Clearinghouse

My Mastodon feed



© 2005-2020 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.