ICANN Finds No Wrong Doing in Domain Front Running 132
eldavojohn writes "Remember the investigation ICANN did in domain name front running? Well, it turns out that there was no wrong doing going on at all. What went wrong? Domain name 'tasting', which involves a free five day trial of a domain name, was the big culprit. From the article: 'In some cases ... the committee found that a separate practice of domain name tasting may be causing problems. That refers to someone testing the financial viability of a name for up to five days and then returning it for a full refund, using a loophole in registration policies. Domain tasting can tie up millions of Internet addresses, including ones someone checks but does not buy.' If you check for availability of a website and someone sees you do it and they reserve it before you, it's fair play."
Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Captain Obvious to the rescue!
I guess it's high time to support truly free DNSes, rather than the corporates. All they do is scam and then hide.
Yeah, but how exactly are they "seeing" this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Transporter_ii
It certainly is deceptive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even "fair" here. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were randomly guessing domains and "tasting" them, who would care?
It's when they have info that you do not have that this becomes a problem.
Whew (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a load off my chest!
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
An example: I'm acting as your agent, or you are considering retaining me as your agent. There's a property you're interested in that appears to be a great deal. You tell me about it and ask my opinion. I tell you I'll check it out and get back to you by tomorrow. Recognizing that it is indeed a great deal, that evening I put in an offer to buy the property myself and leave you out in the cold.
That is both unethical and illegal, and is essentially the same thing that NetSol or any other registrar does when they practice front-running (they're in the position of being your agent, or prospective agent). It's hard to see how ICANN sees nothing wrong with that. True, it may not be illegal or against ICANN's rules, but it certainly ought to be.
Re:Not even "fair" here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow, I just got hit by this today. (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't that exactly what happened?
Re:It certainly is deceptive... (Score:5, Insightful)
> I used to do telephone tech support for software. I quickly learned that if there's an OK button on the caller's screen, I never said OK, because the odds were that the caller would click on it. I can easily see this type of person clicking OK five, or even ten times on a typoed domain name without bothering to read the message even once. No, if you want to avoid typos, have them type the domain name twice, like many programs do with setting passwords and not continue unless they match. Yes, people can always use copy/paste to get around that, but if there's only so much you can do to protect people from their own missteaks.
What a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Possible solution? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not even "fair" here. (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution to all this is for registrars to be prohibited from selling domain names, they should only be in the business of providing their "clerical" service, registering your domain name and putting your numbers in the root nameservers.
By their buying and selling domain names themselves they have created a giant conflict of interest.
I don't say they shouldn't be able to buy and sell domains, just not while they are a registrar.
They should give up their registrar business, or only own the domain name they operate under. And no others.
Registrars have a special position, they have access and knowledge that others do not.
Like the real estate agent mentioned in the parent- he has knowledge he gains due to his position that professional ethics prohibit his using for his own gain.
Similarly registrars have knowledge that others do not, and by their using it for gain they are cheating everyone who is not in their special position. Unfortunately they have no ethics so they have no problem using their special position to screw everyone else.
It's a conflict of interest.
We need to give them ethics by prohibiting their trading in the commodity they have their special position in. Domain names.
What ICANN should do (Score:4, Insightful)
To support this usage model without the kind of abuse we are seeing, reservation should be limited to one hour and should cost the registrar a small amount (maybe 1-20 cents) per reservation. If the customer eventually purchases the domain, the cost of the reservation will not have a ssignificant inpact on the profitability of the transaction.
A simple no refund policy will eliminate the domain kiting scams that are getting happening.
The other place where abuse can occur is when a domain expires. I would propose the following procedure to insure that nobody can lost their domain without really trying:
Once the domain expires, the DNS record is removed from the top level server. After this happens, the (former) owner will have the exclusive right to renew the domain for a period of 45 days. This renewal will be at the normal price, but will start at the expiration date, and not the renewal date. (Thus you lose the time that the DNS was disables.) The 45 days will allow the domain owner to notice that something is wrong, and should be plenty of time for a domain holder to notice their web site or email address no longer works.
After the 45 days, the domain becomes available via an auction which will last at least 15 days. The reserve price of that auction is the normal domain registration fee, with the domain's registrar receiving the proceeds of the auction (to encourage them to not game the system) The auction should have some mechanism to avoid ebay style sniping -- maybe the auction does not close until 1 full day after the last bid is received.
If the auction fails, then the domain returns to the pool, and is available on a first-come first-served as any unregistered domain is.
Re:Did not examine Network Solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe it's because YOUR WHOIS SERVER IS ON THE PUBLIC INTERNET AND WE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO HAVE A REASON.
If you don't want non-customers to WHOIS on your server than make people pay for WHOIS requests, and we'll see how the free market reacts to that. You're telling me NetSol with its higher prices and HUGE legacy customer base can't compete with the cheap-o registrars to the extent that they will tie up someone's domain name in order to gain a competitive edge against
Even just considering what intelligent observers who register a lot of domain names would think of a dick move like this should be enough for a large company to consider the public relations problems that come with deceiving potential customers like this.
Re:What ICANN is (Score:3, Insightful)
And how long do you think it would take them, if this became widespread, to demonize it as a tool of "terrists", "hackers", and pedophiles and outlaw it? The powerful do not relinquish power easily.
Cheers!
Strat
Alonzo Meatball convinced me (Score:1, Insightful)
Now I see why NS does it, and it seems a perfectly reasonable business practice.