The good folks at ICANN met this week in Marrakech, Morocco. They wanted a less comfortable location than the Wellington, NZ site where they met last time, or the Sao Paulo, Brazil location for their next meeting. One thing that happened there was that the “Domain Tasting” practise was attacked, as it has become a vehicle for abuse via controlling names without buying them and for trademark typo-squatting and the like. Who is controllng these names without paying for them? No, not the domainers who usually get blamed for things - certain registrars who are acting like unpaying registrants. Registrars try out names they suspect may have type-in traffic, or residual traffic from previous websites, and test their value with PPC ads. If they turn out to be lucative they will (eventually) renew them, meaning they never get back their $6 deposit from Verisign.
Bob Parsons, from GoDaddy is the most vocal opponent of this, saying that there’s been 32 million names used but not paid for as resut. Nice going Bob, now how about changing the industry’s most abusive specific behavior, GoDaddy’s hostile policy of not allowing transfers for 60 days after a change is made to the WHOIS record.
The largest registrars are in dire need of reformation. They control expired domains for ever longer periods of time, extorting huge fees from legitimate registrants whose names have lapsed, and continue to find new ways to monetize names without adding any value for registrants. Some proposed schemes are so mind-numbing it’s hard to believe anyone could think they were even viable, let alone a good idea. Unfortunately I think increasing regulation is what the future holds for registrars, who will begrudgingly pass along the increasing costs to registrants.
