A question to the registrars here: What fraction of legitimate domain registrations are reversed because the customer didn't know how to spell, and noticed that within the five day "dictionary time"?
Registrar stats fall into two groups. One group is the tasters, who refund essentially all of their domains. The other group is everyone else, who refund about 1%. So that's a reasonable estimate for the number of "legitimate" refunds. We can't tell how many of those are typos, how many are amateur tastes. This whole mess started when people complained that it was far too easy for a domain to expire by mistake and then get scooped up and held for ransom, so ICANN invented the current three stage process where your domain sits expired for a while when you can renew it normally, then goes into redemption for a while when you can renew it for a $200, and only then gets released. Some ICANN staffer took it on him or herself during this process to invent the AGP to solve the non-existent problem of mistaken registrations. According to Karl Auerbach, who was on the ICANN board at the time, the AGP was never debated or really noticed by the board and was just waved through. They had no inkling that it would enable large scale speculation. The important difference between the two grace periods is that if a domain expires by mistake, the registrant loses all of the value he has built around the domain during all the time it was registered, a potentially large amount of money. But if Grandma registers a domain by mistake, all she's out is the ten bucks or so she paid for it. Even now most registars charge a nuisance fee of a dollar or two when you refund a domain, so most of us don't bother to do it. The right solution for domain tasting is just to get rid of it, since the AGP serves only to facilitate abusive speculation. R's, John