Domain Tasting Tonight 6-9pm, Sponsored by VeriSign
Date:
Every day as long as the loophole exists
Time: 24 hrs/day, duration = 5 days
Where: Wang Lee Domains, Monniker Online Services LLC, and countless
others
Cost: $6 per name
You’re
gonna get plastered!
The
phenomenon known as domain tasting is a five-day grace period in which a
registrant can “sample” a domain name before actually purchasing it. Originally
designed to allow for legitimate mistakes (like mistyping a domain name you are
about to buy), has grown into a full-fledged business for spammers and scam
artists, to the point where legitimate registrants now make up only 2% of the
transactions. Anick Jesdanun of the AP likened
it to “buying new clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full
refund after wearing them to a big party.” Nothing wrong with that, is there?
Well,
imagine 6 million dresses in circulation at one time, and how angry the
salespeople are when they get them back, wine-spotted and sweat-stained. Gross.
Also imagine how annoyed you would be if you went to Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus
looking for that perfect little black number, only to find them out of stock.
This
is the frustration that many feel when they go domain shopping – with or
without Mom in tow. Others before them
have snapped up the name they want through an automated system that allows for
sneaky entrepreneurs to grab names that they might generate advertising
revenues, and then ditch the rest before paying. Names can later be resold for
big bucks to legitimate individuals and businesses. Sometimes a company will
reregister the same name the second it expires in order to hold onto it
indefinitely – for free. This practice is called kiting.
Evil,
isn’t it. But that’s the way the market works. If you build it, they will come.
But,
as always, there is a flip side to all this. “Don’t vilify the domain tasters,”
says Frank Schilling, in his Historical
Analysis of Domain Tasting. He explains the irony inherent in the
situation:
…names
are only kept because they have marginal traffic. If these names were not
registered, the traffic would still exist, but rather than flow to the
registrant of the domain name, the traffic would default to Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer Browser or Google’s Firefox toolbar or some other search
browser helper. Every day Microsoft and Google make money selling error traffic
from inactive URLs that come in via browser application.
It
is also ironic that the majority of the revenue from most tasting portfolios
flows to VeriSign and ICANN [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, which is the oversight agency for domain names.] The average tasting
name generates pennies or a few dollars above registration price each year. The
lion’s share of the gross revenue generated by these registrant whipping boys
flows right into the hands of VeriSign and ICANN in the form of renewal and
registration fees (hence the lack of urgency to slow the money train down).
Another conspiracy
revealed.
I see you’re buddies with good old Artie McStrawman.
Tasting is more like renting a car for a few days so you can try it out before deciding to buy. When a domain is deleted, it’s the same as it was prior to registration, it is NOT like returning sweat stained clothes.
There’s no conspiracy – Icann only gets a fee for the names that are kept. The tasters have to have $6 on deposit with Verisign for every domain they taste and they are making greater than usual demands of Verisign’s systems, so it’s only fair that Verisign be compensated.
And kiting doesn’t really happen. It’s a smokescreen perpetrated by Bob Parsons (ceo of Godaddy) to make himself look like a white knight just before his company’s (abandoned) ipo. Call up Verisign and ask what they do to companies who try to move a name between their associated registrars, or simply delete and re-add for more than a month. It’s not in Verisign’s best interest and it’s not in the net’s best interest, so they stop it.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:29 am