ICANN Kills Domain Tasting?

ICANN voted to accept its budget for Fiscal Year 2009. The budget document contains a proposal to impose the transaction fee of $0.20 on domains deleted during the Add Grace Period. The fee will be applied to transactions exceeding 10% of that registrar’s net new registrations in any month or 50 domains, whichever is the greater. The “net new registrations” is defined in as the total new registrations less domains deleted during AGP. For ICANN, FY2009 starts on 01/July/2008. This means that the transaction fee will apply from 01/July/2008 onwards. Of most interest will be its impact on the .com and .net TLDs.
The effect of the transaction fee on excess AGP deletions will be easy to see. The majority of domain tasters will have to reconsider their strategy. Auction operations will also be deterred from sucking up most of the deleting domains.

All that can be hoped for now is that it will be properly implemented and ICANN will not waste more time waffling. It has already damaged the domain industry enough by not acting sooner. This belated action will curtail Domain Tasting. It will not kill it. But rather it will force domain tasters to evolve. However it will make more domains available and that will have a serious impact on the domainer community because it may lower valuations on currently registered domains.
Tags: Irishblogs,Cybersquatting, Domain Tasting, Domains, cybersquatters, Internet Statistics, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on June 26th, 2008 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.