This time, there’s actually an Associated Press piece about domain testing/tasting. If you want to read more about traffic testing, you might want to read Frank Schilling’s: “The Closing Window: A Historical Analysis of Domain Tasting” over at CircleID or my earlier post “How does traffic testing/tasting work?“.

While the article does not really bring anything new, there’s one sentence that I cannot resist commenting on:

A newer variant, sometimes called “kiting,” involves the same company reregistering the same name every fourth or fifth day to hang onto it in perpetuity, without ever paying for it.

As I mentioned before, the registry requires pre-payment for any registration a registrar processes. While the registrar does receive if they delete the domain within the grace period, the amount will be deducted from their account again if the re-register the same (or any other) domain. So the only possible savings are

1. If the registrar has a credit line at the registry and thus would not really have to pre-pay the registrations. Of course the registry could revoke this credit line after a while if the registrar was “kiting” too many domains.
2. The ICANN fee. Since it seems that the ICANN fee is not charged for domains deleted during the grace period, the registrar performing the kiting, would save the current ICANN fee of $0.25 per domain under management per year. I am not quite convinced that this would be worth risking your entire ICANN accreditation.

[Update]: And let me add something. I’d like to see an example of someone who abuses the grace period for spamming. Spammers are not really likely to be accredited registrars themselves, so why exactly would their registrar give them free deletions? Most registrars I know actually charge a small fee for deletions. I can imagine spammers using domains that are being tasted as a sender address, but that would mostly just be a coincidence, like any other address they use.

[via MyWay.com/AP]