I am not sure tasting is criminal or fraud. ... Well, not all of us agree that these ad-only pages are particularly a
On 8/15/07, Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> wrote: problem. They're certainly not necessarily criminal or fraudulent except by some stretch.
There are different applications for domain tasting out there, with different levels of legitimacy. Some of them will go away if you reduce the amount of refund they get for returning the name; some won't. -- Actual mistakes - probably not many of these, and in a corporate environment it's ok if a company has to pay $6 for their mistake; they're going to end up spending more money handling the invoice in most cases. As other people have pointed out, for individuals, getting stuck paying the current $6 fee is a lot less annoying than the old $35 fee if you've made a mistake, but it's possibly useful to have some incentive for the user to return the name if they genuinely made a mistake, such as being one letter away from a popular web site in a country whose language the user doesn't speak or violating a trademark they'd never heard before. -- Ad-banner tasters - They're hoping to make money by littering the domain name space with content-free material, which is not criminal or fraudulent, just rude. Ostensibly you could get rid of them by requiring web pages to have real content, but not only would that require enforcement by humans (yeah, right), but it's trivially easy to generate pages with Not Much Content as opposed to no content at all, if nothing else by putting a boilerplate wiki page there and pretending that you've got real users who just haven't shown up yet. The way to get rid of these guys is to charge money for the pages, i.e. don't force the registrars to return their entire registration fee, and possibly have ICANN keep their US$0.20 cut of the funds even if the customer returns the name. That won't get rid of all of them - some will even be willing to pay the whole $6 - but it'll cut down on most of the ankle-biters. -- Phishers trying to hide - They're not providing ad-banner-only pages, they're providing web forms that look very much like Example-Bank.Com's web site, or are Cyrillic-font variants on Paypal, etc., and they use domain tasting so they can collect hits from suckers for a couple of days and then make their records disappear by returning the name. Charging a restocking fee is less important here - if the phisher's succesful they'll make more than enough to pay for it, unlike the typo-squatters - but there ought to be some requirement to keep the registration information around in case anybody wants to investigate it later, even if it turns out to be bogus information registered from a random zombie's IP address. -- Fast-flux spammers trying to hide _and_ save money - They're also playing the game of keeping a domain name up for a short time so that mail gets delivered and then shutting it down to cover their tracks, as well as serving the DNS and web page information from a bunch of different zombies. (Not all of them do domain tasting - depends on the state of the anti-spammer arms race - but it does let them save $6 for a name they're only going to need for a couple of days before the spam filters cut their response rates down.) According to the Council for Made-Up Statistical Information, getting rid of free domain tasting will get rid of 90-98% of the ad-banner domain tasters, making it easier to track the actual bad guys and laugh at the couple of people who made legitimate mistakes. It also makes it a bit easier to provide reliable alternatives to standard DNS transmission - a back-of-the-envelope estimate I did a couple of years ago said you could multicast all of the DNS root/.com/.net/.org information in near-real-time in about 56kbps, except for the domain tasters, which would make it easy for ISPs and possibly end users to maintain reliable caching servers even if the main DNS root servers were under attack. You'd need a bit more than that today, but it wouldn't be that hard if you could eliminate the tasters (I suppose only transmitting information for domains that were registered for more than a week would do that, and you might need to limit TLDs to weekly, so sites that wanted to use DNS load-balancers would need to put them in www.example.tld instead of just example.tld.) ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.