ICANN To End Domain Tasting!

ICANN has announced some drastic news resulting from it’s most recent board meeting. The ICANN board passed a resolution to impose the ICANN per-name fee on all new registrations, regardless of the registration period!

What does this mean? Where as in the past domain tasting enabled domainers to taste domains for low value fees, this latest resolution will force everyone to pay the full registration fee for a domain regardless of whether the domain was registered for 4 or 365 days.

The ICANN move comes hot on the heels of the move by Google to cut funds to kiters and tasters as blogged about by DNXpert here. Here is an extract of the new ICANN resolution text:

Whereas, the current version of all gTLD registry contracts provides for a five-calendar-day Add Grace period (AGP) following the initial registration of a domain during which a domain may be deleted and the sponsoring Registrar will be credited for the amount of the registration fee (see, e.g., http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/appendix-07-01mar06.htm);

Whereas, the AGP was originally created to allow domain names that had been accidentally registered to be cancelled;

Whereas, the practice of “domain tasting,” by which names are registered and then deleted during the AGP, has grown at a very great rate since 2005, with tens of millions of domains registered and deleted each month;

Whereas, it is apparent that the AGP is being used for purposes for which it was not intended;

Whereas, abuse of the AGP is, in the opinion of the majority of respondents whose statements were collected by the GNSO Ad Hoc Group on Domain Name Tasting (4 October 2007 report), producing disadvantages in the form of consumer confusion and potential fraud that outweigh the benefits of the AGP;

Whereas, the GNSO Council on 31 October 2007 resolved to launch a PDP on Domain Tasting and to encourage staff to apply ICANN’s fee collections to names registered and subsequently de-registered during the AGP;

Whereas, it is the Board’s view that abuses of the AGP should speedily be halted, while the positive benefits of the AGP to consumers should be retained;

Whereas, the positive benefits of the AGP may include, among other things, avoiding fraud and monitoring, testing and development of registrars’ provisioning, production and/or merchant gateway systems;

Whereas, the Board believes that the withdrawal of ICANN’s waiver of ICANN’s non-refundable transaction fee to the deletion of names within the AGP will substantially end the practice of abusing the AGP;

THEREFORE, the Board resolves (2008.01.04) to encourage ICANN’s budgetary process to include fees for all domains added, including domains added during the AGP, and encourages community discussion involved in developing the ICANN budget, subject to both Board approval and registrar approval of this fee.

A voice vote was taken of all Board Members present and the motion was approved by a vote of 13-0. Bruce Tonkin abstained from voting on this item.

It is not known when the new measures will kick in, however we can certainly expect them soon!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.