ICANN announced on Tuesday that it will seek to charge the annual ICANN fee of 25 cents for each domain registration as soon as a domain name is registered, rather than after the end of the five-day Add Grace Period (AGP), in an effort to discourage registrars from abusing the system.
Domain tasting allows registrars to make use of the AGP to register thousands of domains at once for free and then test the amount of web traffic they attract, ultimately deleting those that are unsuccessful at the end of the five-day period.
According to ICANN, in January 2007 the top 10 domain tasters accounted for 95% of all deleted .com and .net domain names.
Domain tasting was among the top reasons cited by WIPO for the record 1,823 cybersquatting-related complaints received by its Arbitration and Mediation Center in 2006.
Earlier this month, the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) council of ICANN issued an Initial Report on Domain Tasting, followed by a 20-day public comment period, which ended on Tuesday.
The proposal will be discussed as part of an early draft budget for the fiscal year July 2008 at ICANN’s meeting in New Delhi in February. The final budget will be voted on during the ICANN meeting in Paris in June.
During the comment period, AIPLA executive director Michael Kirk told ICANN that he applauded the organization for targeting domain tasting. He wrote: “The ‘business model’ of tasters is, in many respects, built around trademark abuse, eg, via the tasting of common typos of well known trademarks and other infringing domain names.”
INTA’s Internet Committee also posted comments, recommending that ICANN “take immediate action to eliminate the practice of domain tasting – preferably by eliminating the AGP or, at a minimum, significantly limiting its availability directly or indirectly”.
A spokesperson for ICANN told Managing IP that he was not aware of any plans to eliminate the AGP, but that the proposed fee “would change the underlying economics of domain tasting”.
Comments made by the ICANN Registrars Constituency said that some registrars believe that domain tasting is merely a result of market demand and that ICANN should not be regulating market activity.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, ICANN president and CEO Paul Twomey, said: "Domain tasting has been an issue for the Internet community and ICANN is offering this proposal as a way to stop tasting. Charging the ICANN fee as soon as a domain name is registered would close the loophole used by tasters to test a domain name’s profitability for free."
