On 8 August 2006, we took industry-leading action to prevent ‘domain tasting’, which has put a stop to the potential abuse of our automated registration service. Domain tasting, which has been a growing issue for .com for over a year, is the practice of registering domain names, assessing revenue generation potential and, if they create an insufficient return, deleting the domain names before the registry requests payment. Through the introduction of a new policy, we put a limit on the number of registrations that can be deleted by registrars.

We provide registrars with the facility to delete domain names registered in error before they have been invoiced. This allows, for example, domain names containing spelling mistakes to be deleted and then re-registered with the correct spelling. Domain names deleted in this way do not incur a registration fee.

Up until 8 August there had been no limit on the number of domain names that could be deleted. However, it is clear that some registrars were abusing this facility by domain tasting. This practice was a breach of our acceptable use policies and placed unnecessary load on our systems, potentially jeopardising access for other users.

“We became aware of domain tasting last year when it first started to affect .com,” said Eleanor Bradley, director of operations. “Since then we have monitored registration and deletion volumes closely. We felt it was necessary to take firm action against this practice. The limit on deletions for practices such as domain tasting is zero. If we detect any uses of the delete operation on our automatic system other than the correction of registration errors, we will take action against the registrar.”

The action has been hailed by the Internet press as a pre-emptive strike to stop the issue becoming a problem. Our actions are also in stark contrast to other registries that are not addressing the rise in domain tasting.

This entry was posted in October, 2006.
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