the secure:channel

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Domain tasting has been a tactic used by spammers for a long time, but it has finally been ended by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, who had the power to control the practice. Domain tasting is a term that refers to the ability of domain name registrars to register and use a domain name for up to five days for free. This allowed a domain name registrar or its proxy to put up a test web site at the domain for up to five days to see if the web site got enough web traffic to pay for itself with advertisements. If the web site didn’t get enough traffic, the registrar could return the domain name and get a full refund. Basically the registrar could taste the domain name for free, and then chose whether it wanted to bite and pay for it.

It was common for domain name speculators, who purchased domain names just to put up pages full of ads, to become domain name registrars or partner with a shady domain name registrar so that they could take advantage of domain tasting to get a leg up on their competition. This resulted in millions of domain names being unavailable every day while they were being tasted, and made it very difficult for the average web site creator to register a good undeveloped domain name.

It also was common for spammers to do the same thing so that they could use new domain names in their spam every day without having to pay for them. It’s well known that spammers have to register a new domain name for a web site link for each new e-mail campaign, because any previous domain name advertised will be blocked by anti-spam filters. As a result, spammers really only need to have a domain name for a few days.

The policies that allowed domain tasting were originally created so that domain name registrars could get refunds for domain names that customers had failed to pay for, usually due to typos. It wasn’t long before many domain name registrars found that this five day grace period could also earn them a profit by doing domain tasting themselves or by selling the technology to more shady businesses.

ICANN has finally put an end to this practice by only allowing up to ten percent of the domains that a registrar acquires in a given month to be returned without being paid for. This should still protect registrars from customers that don’t pay but prevent the shady practice of domain tasting.

The new proposal discussed at ICANN’s Paris meeting is not currently available online, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up, as it may result in registrars simply paying a $0.20 fee for domains over the ten percent limit. Even if that is the case, this is a great way to set the spammers back financially, even if it’s only $0.20 per domain.

Update: ICANN’s published minutes indicate that the committee proposal was adopted without amendments, which is great news. As a result, pending a comment and implementation period, no top level domain operator may offer any refund to a registrar for any domain names deleted that exceed ten percent of that registrars new registrations in that month or fifty domains, whichever is greater. The proposal to charge $0.20 on all deleted domains is still pending.