Last week’s call for feedback on domain tasting from ICANN gained a reasonable amount of coverage. Thomas Claburn writing in Information Week, among others, suggested this raised the possibility that domain speculation might someday be curtailed. The rest of Claburn’s article explains domain tasting and the history. Other articles seem to reproduce the ICANN announcement.Elsewhere, WebProNews also looks at the announcement and domain tasting, suggesting it “may have larger implications than just bulk domainers being clever enough to leverage a bureaucratic loophole. Manipulation like this can affect organic rankings in the search results, and most likely has a direct impact on the cost per click of paid advertisements.” And it’s here that small businesses don’t like domain tasting. The article comments on the ICANN announcement that ICANN doesn’t seem to like the practice “as it does tend to screw with their numbers (and revenues), but ICANN being the quasi-governmental entity that it is, it has to go through the proper channels before cracking down.” WebProNews has some suggestions, these being abolish the grace period so registration fees are non-refundable between registry and registrar, apply ICANN transaction fee to names deleted in the grace period and imposing ‘excess deletion fees’ to registrars for disproportionate deletes. Another option mentioned was to abolish the grace period on bulk buys only.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201500223
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/08/13/icann-does-some-domain-taste-testing
ICANN Calls For Feedback On Domain Tasting
Last week’s call for feedback on domain tasting from ICANN gained a reasonable amount of coverage. Thomas Claburn writing in Information Week, among others, suggested this raised the possibility that domain speculation might someday be curtailed. The rest of Claburn’s article explains domain tasting and the history. Other articles seem to reproduce the ICANN announcement. Elsewhere, WebProNews also looks at the announcement and domain tasting, suggesting it “may have larger implications than just bulk domainers being clever enough to leverage a bureaucratic loophole.