ICANN recently conducted a study into domain tasting, and is now asking for the opinions of members of the public about the practice.

Many domain speculators are engaging in the entirely legal but morally dubious practice of domain tasting. This is when a domainer will buy several thousand domain names and park them all with pay-per-click advertisements. They will then assess the traffic to each of these domains, and any profitable ones will be kept. With the non-profitable domains, the domainer takes advantage of a loophole in the Domain Name registration system: they cancel their registration on these domains before the five day grace period expires, receiving a full refund.

The problem here is that this means many Domain Names which no one is intending to use for long periods are registered for up to five days, making them unavailable to those looking for domain names. Also, domainers’ parked domains can skew search engine results, leading to a frustrating experience for internet users.

ICANN is considering several ways of dealing with the problem, including the elimination of the grace period; making the ICANN annual transaction fee (US$0.20/year) apply even to deleted domain names; or imposing a registry "excess deletion fee", whereby if a high proportion of a user’s domains are deleted, a fee is charged for each domain.

In January 2007, according to the Public Interest Registry, five registrars deleted 1,773,910 domain names during the grace period, and retained 10,862. That same month, VeriSign reported that, among their top ten registrars, 95% of all deleted .COM and .Net domain names were the result of domain tasting.

This suggests that the grace period is being used predominantly by domain tasters, and not by other domain registrants who may have made mistakes when they registered their domains. Some have argued that the grace period is therefore more trouble than it’s worth.