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Comments: 102 +- Technology: Domain Tasting "Officially Dead" Thanks To Cancellation Policy on Friday August 14, @01:07PM
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by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday August 14, @01:07PM
from the plenty-of-other-shady-practices-left dept.
from the plenty-of-other-shady-practices-left dept.
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Ars Technica is reporting that domain tasting has been all but eradicated now that the full penalty for excessive cancellations has taken effect. "In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009. The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent."
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The Many (Miss) Uses of Domain Tasting (Score:5, Insightful)
Next you got domain kiting. Where a jerk "tastes" under one registrar and then cancels five days later and "tastes" under another an then cancels five days later and then "tastes" under yet another registrar
And what's left? Domain Name Front Running like our friend Network Solutions [slashdot.org]? Remind me again what sound logic caused domain name tasting [slashdot.org] to be introduced in the first place?
Lastly, after reading the short report, I'm lead to believe that we're still allowing 10% AGP deletes. My question is simple: Given the above reasons for domain tasting, why allow it at all? I mean everyone's spinning this move in a positive light except for scam artists and con men. So why not just seal the deal and make it "Officially Officially Dead" in a policy?
So you're saying it's mostly dead? (Score:5, Funny)
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. I say we take off and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
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If it's all dead, the only thing left to do is sort through it's pockets for loose change.
Re:The Many (Miss) Uses of Domain Tasting (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The Many (Miss) Uses of Domain Tasting (Score:5, Interesting)
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"Setting up DNS records" is (in some ways) vague and is relatively hard to enforce.
What they have now apparently accomplishes its goal. Best I can tell there's no problem left to be solved.
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Yeah, but for every registrar I've ever used the DNS records are set up the second you purchase the domain.
Not a Valid Use, Submit a Change Request (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the thinking is that it allows people to get refunds if they made a typo during the domain registration process.
So what you're telling me is that the process for making an error in your form is to delete everything and start over? You're telling me that they do this instead of having you submit a request to have it changed? Am I the only one that thinks it would be easier to make a form for requesting changes to your account?
People are human, people err. But it benefits everyone involved if you just fix the mistake when you notice it. The registrar retains your business and you get the domain you wanted. No big deal. But it stops scammers from allocating 300 domains and keeping 3 of them to squat on or whatever they want to do. They should be stuck with 300 domains they have to pay for.
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A change request. Ingenious. Feh.
How about charging for the mistake? After all, it was my mistake, not the registrar's...
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Because there may be actual reasons for people to want to immediately cancel a domain? (Heck, enough people make typos in forms...)
There is probably enough legitimate demand for this service to support something like 5% or so, maybe even the current 10%. Sure, we want to strongly discourage it, but actually disallowing it would be going further than we need to.
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And what if the domain name you wanted wasn't actually available?
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You -want- to believe grandma is legitimately clicking on those ads? You -want- to lump her in with small penis guy?
Disturbing.
Re:The Many (Miss) Uses of Domain Tasting (Score:5, Informative)
Say Google [...] pagerank=0 OTHER, real websites that had the same ad providers these scammers use.
You seem to be assuming Google "do no evil"; I'm afraid you're a few years out of date:
http://www.google.com/domainpark/ [google.com]
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You seem to be assuming Google "do no evil"; I'm afraid you're a few years out of date: http://www.google.com/domainpark/ [google.com]
HOLY SHIT BATMAN!
So Google is one of the culprits in this? I need some valium.
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"it should be criminal to create a webpage stealing feeds from others "
What?
We can't even seem to criminalize ads that say "A Phoenix mom discovers the one rule to lose weight" when there was NEVER a Phoenix mom, NEVER a mom who discovered a rule to lose weight, and NEVER a mom who lost weight involved IN ANY WAY with the ad campaign. Pure, made-up BS. Apparently not criminal.
Surely republishing feed links can't be criminal - you're not even replicating the content, just advertising for them. You're bene
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I think by limiting how many a registrar can change, this encorages registrars to use it for legitimate purposes, such as mis-typed names (if those really happen). Rather than cater to non-customers, they may only make the revocation available to paying customers who aren't really tasting.
I'd suggest a lower threshold like 1%, but it maybe this helps weed out illegitimate (scammer-friendly) registrars because they don't have enough real registrations to make their 10% account for
What was the point anyway?? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's 'tasting,' not 'testing' (Score:5, Funny)
What was the purpose of "domain testing" anyway??
Obviously, some domains have gone bad, like milk left out too long. You don't want to drink the whole thing, so, um, you taste a little bit of it? To see if it's gone sour? Maybe we could replace it with domain smelling, or domain giving it to your wife to see if she spits it out?
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Re:It's 'tasting,' not 'testing' (Score:5, Funny)
domain giving it to your wife to see if she spits it out?
Last time I tried that in the bedroom she threatened to kill me.
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Re:It's 'tasting,' not 'testing' (Score:4, Funny)
domain giving it to your wife to see if she spits it out?
Last time I tried that in the bedroom she threatened to kill me.
I say that we, the males of the species, start a class action suit against the fairer sex for false advertising. Or bait and switch, I'm not sure. All I know is, after we marry them, there's this whole list of stuff they won't do anymore, and if we try to get it in writing beforehand, we get slapped.
"So, if we were to get married, how many blowjobs per week, on average, could I expect to receive?"
"Depends. How flexible are you?"
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That's what she said!
-dZ.
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Re:What was the point anyway?? (Score:5, Informative)
What was the purpose of "domain testing" anyway??
Money, young grasshopper. Money. From TFA:
Never ones to let a good deed go unpunished, scammers quickly learned to take advantage of a user-friendly policy that allowed a misregistered domain name--perhaps due to a typo--to be withdrawn at no cost. Scammers used this "Add Grace Period" to grab huge numbers of domains, throw up pages full of advertising, then withdraw the applications before the bill came due. It was a practice known as "domain tasting," and it gave the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a bad case of indigestion.
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Re:What was the point anyway?? (Score:4, Informative)
Helps with typo-squatting, etc. Keep the domains with high returns and ditch the others. Don't even have to pay for the ones that don't pan out.
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Registering a bunch of domains to see if any are already getting enough traffic to generate enough revenue to make hanging onto the domain worth it or canceling it before the bill comes. Aggressive typo-cybersquatting, a lot of it. Here. [wikipedia.org]
Re:What was the point anyway?? (Score:4, Interesting)
To be clear, a large portion of tasting involved picking up bulk names from the pending delete list. Money was made from domains that might have residual traffic after the delete. Park the domain for a few days then see if the adsense/affiliate revenue outweighed the annual fee. If not, drop it and get the refund.
So typos would be a subset; not every tasted domain would be a typo.
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Re:What was the point anyway?? (Score:4, Informative)
What was the purpose of "domain testing" anyway??
The cited reason, though dubious, was to for example, register your business under a dozen variations of domain names, wait a few weeks or a month, let things hit the search engines etc, and see which one or two get you the most traffic, register those few, and cancel the rest.
The reality of course, due to low and nonexistent abuse provisions, was that the domain squatters moved in en masse and tasted a few hundred thousand domains a month each, on a rotating basis, causing every reasonable unregistered domain name to be perpetually under taste by a squatter, that would be more than happy to sell you the domain for a few hundred or few thousand dollars.
I see this as a good thing for several reasons. Firstly, domain squatters need to die anyway and another nail in their coffin is fine by me. Secondly, I am tired of mistyping a url or poking around with probables looking for something, only to land on "what I need, when I need it." That about makes me want to vomit at this point. Before this enforcement, practically ANY domain name you could enter in was either taken and had content possibly in your interest, (10%) or was under taste. (90%) Now we can start seeing our browser's domain-not-found page once in awhile again.
But then again now we will experience the return of those "helpful DNS redirections" from microsoft and your local ISP.
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Say you got to Registrar A and ask them if example.com is available, and how much it is. Finding it available and being dissatisfied with the price, you go to Registrar B and ask the same, only to be told that the domain is owned by, guess who? Registrar A, who bought the domain because they knew you were interested. Now, you must buy from them or forgo the name. Registrar A would hold onto ownership until the last possible moment they could get a refund.
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Oh how true ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh how true ... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Oh how true ... (Score:5, Funny)
The difficulties in implementing the protocol over TCP seem to be in the fact that the receiver of the "Punch-To-The-Face" packets (PTTFs) must first ACKnowledge the connection attempt before it will be received and, in most cases, they simply refuse the connection.
We're currently researching spoofing methods that may disguise the PTTFs until after the connection is made. However, current attempts to make a Punch To The Face look like a Hug From A Friend or Sex With A Girl have been unsuccessful.
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However, current attempts to make a Punch To The Face look like a Hug From A Friend or Sex With A Girl have been unsuccessful.
It's not like anyone here would know how to ACK those connection attempts anyway.
Re:Oh how true ... (Score:5, Funny)
One of the unfortunate aspects of networked computing is that the cost of antisocial behaviors is so small
I disagree, you JACKASS!
Parent
Sudden? Not quite. (Score:5, Insightful)
We need a new tag: "eventualoutbreakofcommonsense"
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We need a new tag: "eventualoutbreakofcommonsense"
Unfortunately, those happen far too seldomly to warrant a tag.
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You forget, Apathy/Procrastination is a virtue. Just look at some common idioms such as "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it" and "Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow". Or my personal favorite ... "Fuck it!"
Doesn't matter anyway (Score:2, Informative)
because your ISP is tasting all the domains you visit through their DNS. Can they not sell a list of the most popular misspelled domain names? I was alarmed the other day when I mistyped a nonexistant domain and comcast's domain helper came up.
http://www.comcastvoices.com/2009/07/domain-helper-service-here-to-help-you.html [comcastvoices.com]
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What did I drink this morning if it wasn't coffee?
I'm not sure but Starbucks made a business out of selling it.
Next, get registrars out of domain speculation (Score:5, Interesting)
The next step is to enforce ICANN rule 4.2.5 [icann.org] to prohibit registrars from warehousing or speculating in domains.
Who knows how to get their money back. (Score:4, Interesting)
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No you can't. All sales are final.
The shady people were the registrar's /themselves/.
Re:Heavy Penalties (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, now multiply that by the 10,000 domains that some SPAMMER registers, then decides to cancel when they don't pan out...
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Re:Heavy Penalties (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not like scammers work with a single domain. $6.75 * 1,000 or 10,000 is certainly going to discourage some people from being a douchebag. These are people who make tiny amounts of money from a ton of places, $6.75 is enough to destroy each small revenue stream for them.
It's sort of like when you take a penny from the tray at 7-11, except it's a much larger tray, and they take several million times.
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