Domain Tasting - Anti-Domain Tasting Measures

Anti-Domain Tasting Measures

In January 2008, ICANN proposed several possible solutions, including the elimination of the exemption on transaction costs (US$ 0.20) during the five-day grace period, which would effectively make the practice of domain tasting not viable. The ICANN operating plan and budget for Fiscal Year 2009 included a section intended to deal with the problem of Domain tasting. Now the transaction fee of $0.20 is applied to domains deleted in the Add Grace Period where the number of such domains exceeds 10% of the net new registrations or 50 domains, whichever is greater. The "net new registrations" here is defined as the number of new registrations minus the number of domains deleted in the Add Grace Period.

Google said in 2008 that their AdSense program would now look for domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped. These domains will automatically be dropped from the AdSense program.

Starting in April 2009, many top level domains (TLDs) began transitioning from the $0.20 fee for excess domains deleted to implementing a policy resulting in a fee equal to registering the domain.

In August 2009, ICANN reported that prior to implementing excess domain deletion charges, the peak month for domain tastings was over 15 million domain names. After the $0.20 fee was implemented, tastings dropped to around 2 million domain names per month. As a result of the further increase in charges for excess domain deletions, implemented starting April 2009, the number of domain tastings dropped to below 60 thousand per month. However, these statistics only represent reports from the generic TLDs; ICANN does not set policy for the country code TLDs (ccTLD).