No more .ORG traffic tasting as of May 26th, 2007
The .ORG registry will be charging an excess deletion fee as of May 26th, 2007 in order to stop domain tasting. The fee of $0.05 per domain will be charged for grace period deletions of more than 90% of the registered domains. PIR, the operator of the .ORG registry had proposed this change in August of 2006 - it was approved by ICANN.
Time will tell if/when other registries follow. Probably they still enjoy making money off the kept domain names too much for the time being.
[via HighEndNames]
[...] And yes, Jay is right. Verisign has yet to complain about the Domain Tasting and the load it puts on their servers. My guess is they make too much money from the kept names to care about it. And how come the .ORG registry PIR complained about it and was able to push through a resolution that allows them to charge for “excessive” deletions? My take would be that the “keep-rate” of tasted domains in the .ORG namespace is quite a bit lower than the rate for COM/NET domains. [...]
Is $0.05 enough? Why not $1 ? More importantly, if you require a CAPTCHA for the return process, that wont’t be a problem for legitimate returns, but will make things difficult for high-volume domain taster scamming.
Bill, you clearly don’t know squat about DNS. How exactly should a registry provider implement CAPTCHAs when the protocol they use, epp, has no provisions for such stuff?
Obviously the registrars can set up CAPTCHAs since they can use any interface they choose with their customers. But since it’s the registrars who are typically doing the “tasting”, that’s kind of pointless, isn’t it.
The real source of these problems is that the DNS business is almost entirely dictated by the registrars and not the registries, let alone the registrants. The whole concept of grace periods is because these registrars wanted to legislate themselves some freebies. Either that or they (rightly) don’t trust their own software not to go insane and run their accounts empty with erroneous registrations.
As far as making too much money, consider that only $4/year of the wholesale cost of a domain goes to the registry services provider (at least in the case of the .ORG registry, as can be seen from the contract). This $4 needs to cover the cost of the servers which run the registries, the data-centers in which they’re hosted, backups, and accounting systems. All the software has to be custom developed, and debugged. A name which is deleted after just under 5 days costs the registrar nothing, but places the same load on the registry systems as a name which is kept for an entire year, all compressed into a 5 days span of the time. This while providing no income to the registry. The costs are quite high. And that’s just the registry, there’s also the whole DNS provisioning side of the business.