Special interest group suggests that non-refundable $.20 fee is not enough to stop domain tasting.
The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) released a report today about expired domain drop catching. It’s an interesting report and contains good data, although I don’t agree with all of its conclusions.
CADNA hired Zooknic to study 17,000 randomly selected domains dropping on September 18, 2007. Of those names, 100% of the .net and .com domains released were registered by the end of September. Only 21% of the .org domains were registered. Many of the domains were registered and released, and many were released more than once.
The study found that Demand Media’s eNom was the most involved with domain drop catching. It registered 33% of the domains. eNom retained 1,254 domains by the end of September, the report study concluded. Other active registrars included BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman.
Since these latter three domain registrars are well known for cybersquatting, it was easy for CADNA to draw the parallels to domain dropping and cybersquatting. But the report suggests that all expired domain catching is bad and is associated with criminal activity.
CADNA concludes that a non-refundable $.20 fee charged for each registration isn’t enough to stop domain tasting. I agree that it won’t completely stop tasting. It will, however, curb tasting and dramatically cut kiting. At $.20 per 5 day period, that’s $14.60 per year for a kited domain. CADNA points out, and I agree, that even if domains couldn’t be monetized in the first five days (as was incorrectly suggested on Domain Tools’ blog last week), this would not eliminate domain tasting. I agree; simply monitoring traffic during the 5 day period is probably enough to determine whether the domain will be profitable if registered.
CADNA suggests adding an additional fee of at least 50% of the domain registration fee for any domain returned during the add-grace period. Furthermore, registrars would have an even higher return fee if they return greater than a certain percentage of registered domains.
I think this goes too far. There are legitimate reasons to return domain names. Registrars deal with credit card fraud daily. A competing registrar or criminal could easily start charging domains to a bad credit card to run up costs. Instead, a fair way to resolve this would be to make the $.20 ICANN fee and any additional fees kick in only after a certain threshold has been met (e.g. after 3% of all registered domains are returned.)
Let’s not forget that .Org has successfully curbed domain tasting with the implementation of a small fee. Perhaps that is why only 21% of .org domains were registered (correct me if the fee wasn’t in place in September).
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