ICANN Takes a Step Toward Ending Domain Tasting 155
An anonymous reader writes "For years, domain squatters have exploited an ICANN loophole: whenever a domain name is registered, ICANN collects a 20-cent fee from the registrar. To allow for non-paying customers, the registrar can return it five days later for a full refund. The loophole has let unscrupulous registrars constantly create and refund domain-squatting websites, selling 'what you need when you need it' advertising. The problem has grown so bad that every month the world's top three domain squatters, all located in Miami with the same address and represented by the same lawyer, recycle 11 million domain names. After years of complaints, ICANN has finally begun moving on the problem. On April 17 ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization voted to make the ICANN 20-cent fee non-refundable. If the ICANN board ratifies this position in June, those top three squatters will be getting a monthly bill for $2.2M. News of the ICANN changes has been applauded by legitimate Internet businesses, tired of having to choose nonsense names because all the good ones have been squatted. ICANN has published an analysis of the economics of ending domain squatting."
Higher. (Score:5, Insightful)
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All the registrars are gonna do is go 'Ok, $5 non-refundable if you cancel this domain' or something to that effect.
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ICANN part vs. Registry/Registrar Part (Score:2)
Back when somebody at ICANN invented the Annoying Grace Period that facilitates Domain Tasting, they mandated that the registry and registrars give the money back if somebody returns a domain name within 5 days. I guess it "seemed like a good idea at the time", but of course it's become obviou
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very cool with it, in fact. [slashdot.org]
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Why would the registrar be paying this charge when someone returns a domain? It should be the registree who pays this. If you register a domain, part of the contract will be ".20c is nonrefundable" or "$1 is nonrefundable" or whatever.
The cost of a real registration should not go up to cover those who borrow them.
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It is simple. (Score:2)
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Like domain squatters.
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Remember when
Three squatters... (Score:2)
This could create a worse problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, how much does it cost for Registrar A and its affiliate company B to register 1M domain-names and point them all to the same IP address? Not $6M/year.
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Re:This could create a worse problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a good plan, but I think the 20 cents is too low. There should be a 1 or even 5 or 10 dollar fee that's non-refundable, and the total cost of a domain should be higher than it is. That would help eliminate domain tasting as well as eliminate domain squatting, wherein legitimate users have to pay inflated prices for domains anyway because squatters are holding them hostage.
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it seems like he portrayed domain squatting or various forms of domain farming as a valid business.
Back to school with you!
Forcing non-refundable fees would kill the profit margins because these guys is what he said. He didn't say that was a bad thing; the next paragraph states I think it's a good plan, but I think the 20 cents is too low. There should be a 1 or even 5 or 10 dollar fee that's non-refundable, and the total cost of a domain should be higher than it is. That would help eliminate domain tasting as well as eliminate domain squatting...
He said that the fee should be raised, which should h
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Hopelessly Incorrect Calculations (Score:2)
An individual name is profitable if it gets more than ~6.42/year, because that's the cost of registering and keeping it, including the ICANN fee and Registrar fee. Tasting as a practice is profitable today if the additional fees charged by a
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And I was surprised that their number was so high, but consider that over 99% of tasted domains are rolled over.... without refunds, suddenly that's a good deal more cash, even at a few cents apiece.
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The cost of those 199 dud attempts is currently near-zero (so it's worthwhile kiting names even if you don't put much effort into predicting their quality very well, because
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As someone else pointed out, tho, the REAL financial *enablers* are the advertising vendors, primarily Google. If they would refuse to serve ads to any domain that hasn't been continuously registered for at least 30 days (which presumably could be confirmed by WHOIS info), a lot of this
Google vs. Domain Tasters (Score:2)
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Considering they charge at least $6 per domain of pure profit versus pay $.20 they pay out (30x more!), it's a very good deal. That way they have money for sexy superbowl ads!
the ICANNon has fired! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Tasting should never have been allowed in the first place.
More feel-good decisions, less real action (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be much more impressed with ICANN if they actually started punishing the registrars that are so blatantly making profit from internet crime. There is a long list of registrars that sell
ICANN has allowed a long list of criminals to make money off the internet. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to a foreign domain registry, but ICANN is turning a blind eye towards the
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That may be true, but it doesn't really counter my statement of it being a problem that only a small group of people care about. I would have a very hard time believing that domain tasting has affected anywhere near as many people on the internet as has the spam that has been made possible by complacent registrars and the do-nothing organization known as ICANN.
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I bet they use Dell servers to send out the spam, should we require Dell to ensure that all sales are for legit reasons? What about Western Digital and Best Buy that sell all those hard drives to pedos?
It's a nice thought, but probably impossible, and definately illogical.
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Trying to hold ICANN accountable for the registrars, who have to police who they sell to is ridiculous.
Its not a question of ICANN being held responsible for the actions of their customers (the registrars). Its a question of ICANN actually holding registrars to the terms of registrar obligations [icann.org] in the registrar accreditation agreement [icann.org]. In particular, ICANN requires that the registrars maintain valid contact data for their customers, which they seldom do when selling to spammers.
I'm not asking for ICANN to "police" anyone. I'm just asking for them to actually require accredited registrars to meet t
yes i put valid contact data on a domain (Score:2)
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It is by no means as punitive as a legal action, but it can be crippling for a registrar to lose their ability to sell
you STILL do not understand a thing (Score:2)
I don't think you're paying attention... (Score:2)
However, if you actually read the rules, you'll see that they apply to registrars, and not domain owners. So really it doesn't matter what you do in the Cayman Islands with your domain, as far as ICANN is concerned. However, if your registrar is providing bogus data for your registration, then
no you are not paying attention (Score:2)
how do you come to that conclusion? (Score:2)
For that matter, read what I already said. You are talking about crime, and I am talking about ICANN registrar regulations. The two are not the same. ICANN is the corporation that regulates who can sell domains within certain TLDs. It doesn't matter if the activity is criminal anywhere or not, ICANN's ability to act against registrars is based on the registrar accreditation process and requiremen
ICANN's Registrar Obligation Terms are Bad (Score:2)
Maybe you haven't been watching the domain name policies evolve, and assume that they way they are today is both good and necessary. I've been paying attention to them since the mid-80s, and back then it wasn't clear that the market would even accept a system that had a single Root in charge of who could use what names - after all, UUCP worked quite well without it, a
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And of *course* you were asking for ICANN to police people who want to buy domain names
I urge you to go back to my original post and read it more carefully. At no point did I ask ICANN for policing of domain registrants. My complaint is that ICANN does a horse-shit job of regulating registrars.
Have you read the requirements for accredited registrars? They really don't ask much from the registrars, and really they don't even ask that accredited registrars keep up
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A
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I am simply asking that ICANN actually require the registrars that they have accredited to follow the terms of registrar accreditation. Why is this so hard for you to understand?
The examples that I gave are not because I am looking for enforcement for specific situations. Ind
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They can take your domain away if you provide false information on your whois
Who can take your domain away?
ICANN won't do it. I can tell you that because I've filled out the bad WHOIS data form for dozens of domains and they've never been taken away by ICANN.
The registrars generally won't do it, either. Hell, they're making money off of the customer whose bad data they submitted. What is the incentive for them to fix it, unless the customer asked them to?
The problem lies with ICANN. They have set rules, but then they don't actually enforce them. There are registrar
Re:More feel-good decisions, less real action (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I'm not going to sell you this domain because I disapprove of the purpose for which you will use it" is a dangerous position to take. What's happening here is just closing a loophole that allows domains to be used for free- a simple, clear problem.
The first problem with your statement is the fact that ICANN does not sell domains. I'm talking about problems with ICANN and how the regulate (or rather fail to regulate) the registrars that they are tasked with the regulation of.
It has nothing to do with whether or not ICANN gives a damn what domains are being used for - they've already shown they don't. It has to do with the fact that ICANN has laid out rules that registrars are supposed to be obliged to follow (see the link I posted previously)
percentages (Score:2)
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squatting is affecting EVERYone, whether they are startups trying to get a good domain or ordinary people trying to set up a family album site.
I disagree. How many people who are using the internet are looking to purchase a domain name, if they don't already own one? There are plenty of users on the internet who have zero interest in owning a domain name - for that matter there is still a large portion of internet users who wouldn't even know what to do with their own domain name, if it were given to them for free this afternoon.
On the other hand, though, how many email addresses don't receive spam of some sort anymore? The statistics o
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people who are using decent services like gmail, or serious web hosts for email do not receive any noticeable amount of spam
Those are just the effects of filtering you are talking about at that point. You are ignoring the storage and computational costs of those filters. You are also ignoring the false positive effects of the same. You cannot just discard the impact of spam because you like your filters.
And once you take into account the traffic, storage, and computational costs of spam, and how essentially everyone has to pay to deal with it one way or another, you'll see that it has a much larger impact than domain tas
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there are pluses and minuses for everything. entire wold is using cars for transportation, and its working well. but there are the environmental costs that is making entire world pay. same goes for email protocol. it works real well, but it has its downsides. you have to put up with them, because this is the way life works. you cant get a rose without its thorns.
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excuse me but you are just escaping to irrelevant arguments as defense.
I'd be interested in knowing how you came to that conclusion.
I began this thread by stating that more people are affected by spam than by domain tasting. I have stayed on topic with that throughout. Every statement I've made since you replied to this part of the thread has been on how spam affects more people, more significantly, than domain tasting.
I guess if you don't like the argument, you don't have to. But that doesn't make it irrelevant just because you disagree with what I've said.
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I began this thread by stating that more people are affected by spam than by domain tasting.
let me give an example and answer both questions of yours, one of which was 'how did you come to that'.
much more people are affected by mosquitoes than spam. or domain tasting. yet, we are not proceeding to drench every lake and pond and stillwater around the world.
because mosquito problem is a minor annoyance. it is a problem only in countries where diseases that are carried around by them still exist. for the rest of the world, its a minor annoyance.
same goes for spam and domain tasting. spam is
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let me give an example and answer both questions of yours, one of which was 'how did you come to that'.
The question I just posed to you is how did you come to conclude that I am "escaping to irrelevant arguments in defense".
You utterly failed to answer that question. But we can continue anyways.
compared to spam, domain tasting affects anyone who intend to use domain names
Domain tasting can affect people who want to purchase new domain names. It does not affect everyone who intend to use domain names, as you state. People who already own domain names are not affected by domain tasting, since their domains are already registered.
And you are still ignoring the fact that th
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The question I just posed to you is how did you come to conclude that I am "escaping to irrelevant arguments in defense". You utterly failed to answer that question. But we can continue anyways.
you utterly failed to establish analogy. the idea is, there are many things in the world that we are utilizing to an extreme extent, and they all have their downsides. if you cant accept drying all still waters because of the mosquito problem, your argument becomes invalid.
Domain tasting can affect people who want to purchase new domain names. It does not affect everyone who intend to use domain names, as you state. People who already own domain names are not affected by domain tasting, since their domains are already registered.
you are taking things out of their context here. domain tasting is destructive for someone who needs to purchase domain names. however spam is a minor annoyance for someone using email. you are taking WHOLE internet users and then us
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the idea is, there are many things in the world that we are utilizing to an extreme extent, and they all have their downsides.
Are you trying to make a point with that statement, or are you just trying to fillibuster the conversation? That statement has virtually no application to the topic or the thread.
If you read back to what I originally said, and take a look at what ICANN's duties are, you'll see that analogies are not needed. Everything I have been saying has been in the context of ICANN's mission to regulate internet registrars. My argument is that ICANN is failing on this mission and instead they are coming up with
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Are you trying to make a point with that statement, or are you just trying to fillibuster the conversation? That statement has virtually no application to the topic or the thread.
if you are not able to get the analogy there, i doubt that debating with you will bear any fruit. therefore ill just run a short reply to your post all in one go and get off this conversation.
law prevails. legally registrars are doing nothing wrong, they are sticking by the laws where they are incorporated and sticking with icann rules too. its the abusers that are abusing the system in places that they can, and you have to proceed with that country's law against it, or international laws, or wto rules.
have you read anything I have said? (Score:2)
i doubt that debating with you will bear any fruit.
Debating generally involves actually acknowledging that the other person has said something. You, on the other hand, have been just taking what you want to see from my posts, and then twisting it into something other than what I have said. Case in point:
law prevails. legally registrars are doing nothing wrong
I have not said anything about the registrars action (or lack thereof) regarding illegal activities. I have acknowledged several times (yet you have failed several times to read it) that ICANN has no legal authority. ICANN cannot do anything with
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You have been forgiven for your mistake. Hopefully you've learned a little about your own assumptions and will read more carefully before going down the same path in the future.
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I would be much more impressed with ICANN if they actually started punishing the registrars that are so blatantly making profit from internet crime. There is a long list of registrars that sell .com domains to spam kings like Kuvayev for him to sell drugs and pirated software.
Asking ICANN to police the legality of online vendors is like asking the Social Security Administration to police credit card fraud because, after all, you can't get a credit card without presenting a social security number, right?
In other words: get a clue, ICANN is neither empowered nor equipped to act in any sort of law enforcement capacity. They're a corporation (that's what the 'C' in ICANN stands for) not a government agency.
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Asking ICANN to police the legality of online vendors
There's no policing in my statement. You placed it there. I am asking that ICANN actually enforce the registrar policies [icann.org] that they state on their own website for registrars seeking accredited status. If you read that, you'll see it has nothing to do with legality or lack thereof. Indeed, it has nothing to do with vendors, either. It is all about the registrars, which is where my beef stands with ICANN. There are plenty of registrars that have attained the accredited status (allowing them to sell in
ICANN shouldn't be in the censorship business (Score:2)
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people like you in the Enemies-of-Evil business, would like it, ICANN shouldn't be in the censorship business, and for the most part they aren't
I never said that they were, nor did I ever ask them to be. My gripe with ICANN is in how they deal with registrars, or rather in how they don't.
If you go back and read what I posted, you will see that my gripe is in how they fail to actually enforce the regulations that they place on registrars. In particular, they require accredited registrars to provide accurate whois data. However, if you run a whois on a spamvertised domains, odds are the whois d
Hear hear (Score:2)
The service that registrars provide is so basic, if someone can charge NSI's prices, it means that there is a market failure.
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doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
This "domain tasting" thing
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Or at any rate, that's how this shit is supposed to work.
Nifty - Until you do some math (Score:2, Informative)
Let's see: 365 days a year, and they can only hold them for 5 days, so that's 73 times a year to cycle a name (give or take). Let's just round it to 75 because I'm cool like that.
So .20 a cycle at 75 cycles per year means it'll cost a whole $15.00 per year to taste a domain name.
Sure, with 11 million domains to cycle through that makes for a pretty big number. But, Considering that you can sell useful domains for anywhere from $20 to $20,000... They can still keep cycling all they want. Just the less
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other option (Score:2)
Domain name != website (or any other service)... (Score:2)
It seems that some people are forgetting that a domain name has nothing to do with a website. That is, hosting a "legit" and "useful" website using a domain name is NOT the only reasonable activity that demonstrated "non-squatting".
A domain name is simple a human language token for an system of IP address
Re:Domain name != website (or any other service).. (Score:2)
For example, http://rtfm.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] puts up a static-content page that tells you what the site is for, even though it's meant to be an ftp repository for usenet FAQs (I realize that rtfm.mit.edu is not actually a domain name, and also that there's really no reason not to have a web interface for something l
Solution already found (Score:2)
zone "name-services.com" { type master; file "empty.zone"; };
zone "domainservice.com" { type master; file "empty.zone"; };
zone "fastpark.net" { type master; file "empty.zone"; };
(etc. etc. etc.)
empty.zone:--
@ IN SOA localhost. hostmaster.localhost. ( 2008042900 172800 900 1209600 3600 )
IN NS localhost.
It has a flavr? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Squatting = 5 Days??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unpossible, you say? Not if you are really a sham company who buys a domain name and returns it 4.9 days later, only to be immediately picked back up again by another sham company which happens to be located in the same place as the first, and again only holds the domain name for another 4.9 days to again return it for a refund and have it immediately picked back up again by a third sham company - a mirror image of the past two, which again holds the domain for 4.9 days, only again to return it for a full refund, at which time the first sham company picks it up again, starting the cycle all over again, ad infinitum - and at $0.00 net cost to the companies.
It's not that squatting = 5 days, but that this process continues for years. Making that $0.20 fee non-refundable means that now every 4.9 days in the above merry-go-round, there is a 20 cent charge for that domain name. What used to be free to do will now cost $1.50 a month - PER DOMAIN NAME if they keep doing this, which, obviously they will not be able to afford.
Chances are they will now have to cough up some hard cash to actually register the million or so domain names they have, or let them expire and be free amongst the intertubes yet again for legitamite buyers to catch.
excellent (Score:2)
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"In a world...
Where 5 days last forever...
A week never goes by...
A lawn never gets mowed..."
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Again, wrong (Score:2)
How do you collect?
Who gets the money?
If you can figure that out, and allow people to send 2500 email a month for no charge, it might work.
Of course, spammers will find away around it, like have other peoples computers send the emails.
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But in reality, that would never work out. Who decides your computer is secure? All the corporate ISPs running ISA firewall? Does that cut out all Wii, PS3, iphone, etc from getting on their network without a "trusted client". Does that stop a small company from running squirrel mail servers and allow big telco to require all the email be hosted off THEIR servers?
My favorite idea would be to do time sinked emails. Make a connection take 5
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How is it fair to punish ANY fraction of the legitimate users for the sins of the abusers??
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Hell, slashdot has to be among 'em -- how many of the over a million registered users get the daily mailing?? if even 5% do, that's 50,000 per DAY.
And it's the sort of thing that once established, the threshold will creep downward until we DO wind up paying (in some way, maybe not cash) to send each email, even email for personal use.
And I don't like the idea of punishing legit users for the sins of spammers, any more than I like wholesale restrictions from t
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big words (Score:2)
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Sounds like bullshit to me. See Contacting the Presidential Libraries [archives.gov]. It lists the addresses of all the presidential libraries. eg:
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No ads for tasters!! (Score:2)
That's an interesting point. If the advertising revenue from Google and its kin weren't AVAILABLE to domain tasters and short-term squatters, those aspects of the problem would vanish overnight.
So, my challenge to Google et al.: Find a way to ensure that your ads are being delivered ONLY to stable, non-tasted domains. I'd think this part could be accomplished simply by checking the WHOIS info for the first-date-