On Aug 15, 2007, at 12:38 PM, Al Iverson wrote:
On 8/15/07, Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> wrote:
I am not sure tasting is criminal or fraud.
Neither am I, we agree. I meant if there's subsequent criminality or fraud that should be dealt with separately.
Dumb question, not necessarily looking to call you or anyone out, but I'm curious: What valid, legitimate, or likely to be used non-criminal reasons are there for domain tasting?
Working out which domains tend to get a lot of traffic, so that you can put profitable content on those that tend to have people stumble across them. This is definitely not criminal. It's certainly a valid, legitimate business approach under the current domain registration model.
Then my next question is, what reasons are there where it'd be wise/useful/non-criminal to do it on a large scale?
It's only likely profitable to do the above if you can amortize your fixed costs over a fair number of profitable domains, and you'll likely need to measure traffic on a large number of domains to find those. (My understanding was that most, if not all, of the "domain tasting" churn was actually done by registrars, either directly or using a "partner" to do the grunt work. That would mean that the costs were offloaded onto the registry. ICBW.) Cheers, Steve