ICANN Looks To Stop Domain Tasting

Quote

Bruce Tonkin recused himself from the discussion and dropped off the call during the discussion of items 5 & 6 due to potential conflict of interest. Kurt Pritz indicated that tasting is a practice that has grown over the years and that many recent discussions and writings demonstrate that the Board is already well versed on the related issues. Kurt indicated that ICANN has collected some information that a few parties have taken the practice to its logical conclusion, and operate exclusively on this model - deleting as much as 95.5% of names registered within the five-day grace period. Others exercise degrees of restraint. There are a spread percentage of names deleted in the grace period across all registrars that ranges from 0% to 99.5%. ICANN has had many discussions and consultations on this issue. It was proposed that ICANN charged a transaction fee on add-grace deletes in the 2004-2005 budget but there was substantial criticism that such a fee would be de-facto policy making by ICANN staff. Recently the GNSO voted to recommend that staff take action to change its transaction fee to change in for tasting deletes. If ICANN changed transaction fee in this manner, most think practice would cease. The vote represents Supporting Organization policy support for alternative budget.