The ICANN board just passed the following motion to end Domain Tasting, “THEREFORE, the Board resolves to encourage ICANN’s budgetary process to include fees for all domains added, including domains added during the AGP, and encourages community discussion involved in developing the ICANN budget, subject to both Board approval and registrar approval of this fee.”
It did not directly deal a death blow to tasting, but it was a definitive motion that will kill it this year. This policy is expected to go into effect when the new budget is approved, and that process typically happens in the summer.
http://www.icann.org/minutes/prelim-report-23jan08.htm
It seems all the heat on Domain Tasting in the last few weeks is causing everyone to take action, from Google to the ICANN Board. I applaud the decision to kill the abusive process of millions of free domain names, but I would caution the original use of the Add Grace Period (AGP) is still needed. The AGP was originally designed for very legitimate reasons: erasing domains purchased with a spelling error or for testing the registry computer system.
When the ICANN staff implements the new policy, there are specific things they should allow. Each registrar should have a testing limit of drops in the AGP, possibly 10,000 per month or 3% of all adds, whichever is greater.
One way to keep domain registration prices low is to not increase the domain registration costs for registrars. Bad credit cards are one of the reasons the AGP is needed. Registrars are severely affected when they purchase a domain from Verisign for $6+ and that purchase turns out to be from a stolen credit card. If the average margin on a domain is $1.00, it will take six legitimate registrations to pay for that one fraudulent domain purchase. Keeping costs low for registrars is a good thing. Domain Tasting should end, but registrars still need some use of the free AGP. The board made the motion to include the following language:
Whereas, it is the Board’s view that abuses of the AGP should speedily be halted, while the positive benefits of the AGP to consumers should be retained; Whereas, the positive benefits of the AGP may include, among other things,avoiding fraud and monitoring, testing and development of registrars’ provisioning, production and/or merchant gateway systems;
I am extremely happy Domain Tasting will end. I do feel a bit sad, though, since I coined the term Domain Tasting and now the phrase will be only used historically.