ICANN Proposal to end Domain Tasting
ICANN has announced a proposal to end domain tasting by charging the annual ICANN fee at the time a domain name is registered. If this proposal is approved, then whenever a domain name registration is deleted during the five-day Add Grace Period, only the registration fee (and not the ICANN fee) will be refunded to the Registrant. (See our earlier post describing Google’s efforts to take the profitability out of domain tasting.)
According to ICANN, in January, 2007 “the top 10 domain tasters accounted for 95% of all deleted .com and .net domain names” (45,450,897 domain names out of 47,824,131 total deletes).
Dr. Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO, stated “Charging the ICANN fee as soon as a domain is registered would close the loophole used by tasters to test a domain name’s profitability for free.”
ICANN’s proposal will be part of the budget process for the fiscal year starting July 1, 2008 and will have to be approved. ICANN-accredited registrars representing at least 2/3 of ICANN fees collected will be asked to approve this proposal.
This entry was posted by Karen Monteith on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Domain Name Disputes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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[...] As an update to an earlier post regarding domain name tasting, ICANN’s GNSO Council invites public comments and constituency impact statements regarding its draft proposal to curb domain tasting. Under the proposal, any gTLD operator that has implemented an add grace period (”AGP”) would be prohibited from offering a refund for any domain name deleted during the AGP that exceeds 10% of its net new registrations for a month, or 50 domain names, whichever is greater. The proposal also provides that an operator may seek an exemption for a particular month, upon documented showing of extraordinary circumstances. As well, the draft proposal states that ICANN staff will monitor implementation and execution of the recommendations. (For more information about domain tasting, see the GNSO Initial Report.) [...]