insight 

Yesterday ICANN announced that they are proposing to remove their five-day ‘Add Grace Period’ which previously allowed registrars to rectify errors when registering new domain names without cost. Due to serial abuse of this facility by speculators testing the profitability of domain names through advertising revenues, ICANN will instead debit the payment as soon as the domain name is registered.

Although this change will clearly deter tasters from registering high volumes of domains speculatively, it will also make the process of registering less flexible for registrars. It remains to be seen exactly how the new process will work, but it is probably safe to assume that if the registrar has to pay these costs upfront they will ultimately be passed to their customers.

When we took steps against domain tasting in August 2006, we decided to introduce limits on the number of domains a registrar could delete. Our limit for deletions to rectify spelling errors etc is five domains or 5% of the total number of domains registered but not yet invoiced (whichever is higher) but the limit for practices such as domain tasting is zero, and the limits form part of our registrar agreement, the formal contract that all our registrars sign up to. We believe this solution is neater, as it effectively counters the practice of domain tasting but at the same time allows some flexibility for registrars where genuine errors have occurred.

In a separate move, Google announced last week that they will start to monitor domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within the current five-day grace period, and exclude them from their AdSense program. Such a move would clearly strike at the heart of the problem. If tasters stop receiving revenues for pay-per-click ads associated with the domains they are testing, they will soon stop trying.

Both proposals have their merits, and it is encouraging to see that concerted efforts are being made from various sectors within the industry that could herald the beginning of the end of this practice.

Domain Name Front Running (DNFR) is a new buzzword acronym for the alleged practice of monitoring someone’s intentions to register domain names and then jumping in and registering them first.

Every now and again we get complaints about this sort of thing and we’ve investigated some of those in some depth in the past.  Our conclusion is that DNFR does not happen but that there are important characteristics in the way domains names are sought that many people do not know about that lead them to believe in something like DNFR.

You can read our full position paper here.

This is an issue that has recently been passed to the ICANN SSAC for them to study but it may turn out to be a waste of their valuable time.

In amongst all of the preparations for the IGF this week, we managed to snatch a quiet moment to draft our formal response to the request for comments on ICANN’s draft Strategic Plan.

There was a packed room in Los Angeles just the other week when we made some verbal inputs on the plan and the future direction of ICANN seems to be a hot topic at the IGF. Increasing participation in ICANN and improving ICANN’s transparency and accountability have been popular themes. So why then are there only 2 comments (of which ours is one) on the most recent draft?

The link to our input is here:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/stratplan-2008/index.html

We’ve just released a position paper on signing the root. There is quite a lot to this but I thought I would attempt to summarise the paper for those of you who don’t want to read the full seven pages.

Read more

I see that there have been a few stories in the press regarding ICANN investigating the practice of registering a domain name based on the search someone has done on that domain name. As far as we are aware this practice is not widespread in the UK. Read more

The US Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently announced the renewal of a contract with Neustar to manage the .us domain name space. Read more

We’re watching the launch of .asia with interest. Yesterday saw the opening of the sunrise period during which organisations with Trademarks can register domain names. If there are multiple registrations for the same domain, then instead of the usual first come first served process as observed with the launch of .eu there’ll be an auction this time. Read more

I noticed with interest that NASK, the .pl Polish registry has made an announcement regarding a domain name tasting service. Read more

There were a couple of interesting stories in the news last week – a new CEO at denic the German registry and the intended transition away from .su the old suffix for Russia.

New appointments at denic

The news of the new appointments at denic is welcome. Sabine Dolderer and Dr. Jörg Schweiger will manage the business of DENIC eG as of 1 October as CEO and CTO respectively. We welcome these appointments and knowing Sabine of old we are sure she will do a good job for this important registry.

Retiring .su

The Register are running a story on the intended transition away from .su . This is a challenging matter for ICANN. As the world and its boundaries change, so the ISO list of countries and their 2 character ccTLDs change. If a country is no more, such as Zaire or Yugoslavia, then the relevant suffix is closed down and all domain names transitioned away. However, it’s not a simple process, as can be seen with the .su suffix, which is still registering names.

The story comments on other parts of the ISO list that cause ICANN headaches, including the comment that the UK ccTLD is .uk not .gb, as it is appears in the list. This appears to have stirred up some debate amongst the readership of EL Reg with several comments from their readership regarding why .uk is more appropriate and the usual end ramble from both sides of the pond about who invented the Internet anyway. Anyway, with more than 6 million domains we can assure you that .uk is here to stay.