[At-Large] ALAC Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting

To ICANN Board:
We request ICANN Board to seriously consider how to prohibit unfair speculation, enhance consumer trust to Domain Name registration system, by
a) Initiating a third party study on the impact of Domain Tasting and Domain Monetization/speculation to the ordinary Internet users.
b) Initiating review of Registry – Registrar Contract that will promote the fair trade and restrict unfair speculation.

Background and Rationale:
Domain tasting uses the five day add grace period to register domains without paying for them. We think they are unfair acts: somewhere between larceny and extortion, because the registration cost is zero and the purpose of these registrations is just to make money taking advantage of automated bulk registration to exploit the domain names which are the public goods in essence.

As many people have noted, it's exploiting a loophole that shouldn't be there in the first place. There was a great deal of debate both in the ICANN community and on the ICANN board about the deletion grace period, but none at all about add grace which was apparently tossed into the package by an ICANN staffer without asking anyone. So says Karl Auerbach, who was on the board at the time, and I haven't seen anything to the contrary from any other board member.

As Bob Parsons wrote in his blog:
Millions of good .COM domain names – on any given day over 3.5 million and climbing — are unfairly made unavailable to small businesses and others who would actually register and use them in ways for which the names were intended. Many times businesses accidentally let their domain names expire. When they go to renew them, they find they have been snapped up – and taken away with a huge expensive hassle to follow – by an add/drop registrar.

(http://www.bobparsons.com/adddropscheme.html)

The usual explanation of domain tasting says that the registrars register millions of domains, watch the traffic, and then after 4.9 days they delete the ones that don't seem likely to make back the US$6.00. Often they just delete them all and then reregister what they can a few minutes later until they find the ones which produce enough traffic that yields well above $6 cost.

The add grace period is just a mistake. The problem it purports to solve is not and never was an important one. If you let an important domain expire, you risk losing the entire investment made in that domain over many years. But if one registers a domain by mistake, the most one risks is the ten or twenty dollars you paid to register it.

On Domain Monetization
We note that there is a meaningful difference between domain tasting and domain monetization. Monetization is a straightforward arbitrage between the cost of domain registrations and the revenue from as much pay-per-click traffic as the domain owner can get from people who visit web sites in the domain. It's a fundamentally sleazy business, since the web sites have no useful content and the way they get the traffic is basically by tricking people, either via typos or recently expired domains.

We do not think it is appropriate in this case to make ICANN as a regulator to watch and prohibit the Domain monetization practice. Instead, we like to ask those commercial activities such as Google or Overture to stop paying for clicks on pages with no content, thereby dealing with a problem that is not limited to typo and expired domains. We've seen click arbitrage, people buying Google ads to drive traffic to pages that are simply other Google ads. This kind of self-generating traffic for pay-per-click advertising is confusing and unnecessary for ordinary Internet users and , in the long run, not healthy for the development of Internet as a whole.

END

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