ICANN Vote On Domain Tasting?

ICANN Votes On Domain Tasting

[jmccormac]

It looks like ICANN's board will vote on the Domain Tasting issue today in Paris, France. The vote is on a proposal in the budget that will have the transaction fee of $0.20 applied to domains that are deleted during the Add Grace Period where the number of domains deleted during AGP exceeds 10% of the registrar's net new registrations in that month or 50 domains, whichever is greater. (The net new figure is defined in the proposal (17/April/2008 and the ICANN Budget for FY 2009) as being the total new registrations less domains deleted during AGP.) This proposal is on page 20 of the ICANN budget [1] for Fiscal Year 2009 and is to be voted on today. ICANN's Fiscal Year 2009 begins on 01/July/2008. Making sense of all this ICANN bumpf is difficult as ICANN's secondary function seems to be to produce reams of spurious paperwork, proposals and mind-numbing reports. Domain Tasters, at the moment, do not have to pay this trasaction fee for domains deleted during the AGP hence the massive abuse of the AGP. (If any people who are knowledgable about the machinations of ICANN are reading, perhaps they can clarify what is being voted on and what the relevant proposals are and whether the budget will be approved etc.)

Is this the end for Domain Tasting? Well it has to be passed by the board first. But if applied, it will curtail Domain Tasting but not kill it. It will stop certain players from buying up the bulk of each day's drop en-masse. If the fee is applied from 01/July/2008, it might return .com and .net to a more steady growth curve but it may also cause a drop in new registrations initially.

Regards...jmcc
[1] [icann.org...]

[Webwork]

Thanks for the status report jmcc.

ICANN's inability to move swiftly to address this system abuse screams incompetency. I've lost track of just how long tasting has been on ICANN's radar? 2 years? More? Sad.

[jmccormac]

I'm still not sure what they are up to Webwork.
ICANN seems to care more about generating a consensus than making a decision. The .com and .net domain counts from the zonefiles over the next few days should be interesting if the ICANN board manages to deal with the issue as the last few days of the month will have an AGP window that covers 01/July/2008. I normally process the zonefiles on the first of the month for com/net/org/biz/info/ie/mobi/asia here but I'll run the stats for the next few days purely out of interest. Hopefully ICANN's decision to apply the transaction fee will have the same effect as PIR's did on .org last year. The main tasters were buying up what appeared to be the entire .org drop. After the imposition of the new fee structure, their new/delete ratio collapsed. But even with ICANN's "net new registration" solution, there is still a potential for DTing by spreading the tasting across a network of related registrars.

Regards...jmcc

[bwnbwn]

Or just plain old "Good ole Boy" pay me type attitude. Got to be money under the table here just to much of it floating around in the domain business.
Case point.
I have been watching a domain now go from one parked register to another parked each for one week Domain Tasting. The domain is now on it's 3rd parked register and this is plain grabage and who knows when it will end. I will continue to monitor it till it does and see just how many parked registers this domain flips to before it is either renewed or dropped.

[jmccormac]

If, and it is still if, ICANN votes to apply the transaction fee, it will hit domain kiting as well as it relies on much the same mechanism (the AGP) as domain tasting. However ICANN's registrar system as it now stands is broken. There are groups of registrars that probably only exist on paper (again the same MO as the phantom registrars that destroyed .eu ccTLD) and who only register domains for themselves. Lax oversight and sheer incompetence allowed these problems.

I spent the last few months developing a historical database covering the nameserver history of every com/net/org/biz/info/mobi domain back to 2000. Kited and tasted domains tend to show up clearly. The other interesting thing is how frequently the tasters and kiters change their primary nameservers in order to make it difficult for people to track them.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

Link to the ICANN board meeting with Real Audio feed and text feed. Domain Tasting is item 4 on the agenda.

[par.icann.org...]

Regards...jmcc