If you are planning on going public it’s a great idea to get mentioned in the media as often as possible. Especially if you are “the good guy”. Hence Bob Parson brought up his newly invented term for an old practice once more, but this time in front of a different audience – As a feature article in Business Week Online: Getting the Drop on Domain-Name Abuse.

Basically the article is a reprise of his blog post. Once again, he does provide numbers, but he does not provide any statistics or more detailed information on the registrars that he accuses of registering and deleting the same names continuously within the grace period. As far as we could tell in our research, names do indeed often get tested multiple times in a row. But this testing occurs via different registrars and different corporate entities.

The article seems to attract the usual crowd, the GoDaddy supporters and the critics exposing some of the stains on GoDaddy’s clean sheet: Starting with information on how GoDaddy defaults all domain registrations to domain parking and ending with comments on how GoDaddy auctions names that are potential trademark infringements.

If all of this traffic testing really puts such a huge load on the registries, you can only wonder why ICANN and the registries have allowed this practise to continue for so long. The answer probably is (as so often): Money! The registry and ICANN earn money off every domain name kept. $0.25 annual ICANN fee and $6.00 annual registration fee for Verisign for any .COM name kept. So the cost to allow this testing only increases as the “keep rate” of the tested domains goes lower and lower. I would imagine that this rate is probably below 0.5% now and dropping. Any of the testing registrars care to comment?