The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has once again decided to look into ways to cope with the controversial practice of domain tasting.

Domain tasters register hundreds of domain names at a time and then "test" the traffic to those domains, cancelling their registration of any worthless domains, and retaining the profitable ones. The practice is made possible by the grace period for registration which allows registrants to cancel their registered domains up to five days after registration without incurring any cost.

But the practice harms businesses, according to intellectual property experts. Thousands of domain names are tied up in domain tasters' accounts for five days at a time, meaning that someone searching for a domain to use for their business may find that the one they want has been snapped up. This dramatically reduces the number of domains available at any one time.

Tasting also has a negative impact on other domain registrants because the increased strain on the registries forces them to raise their fees. The US company who controls the .com and .net TLDs, VeriSign, has said that there are thirty times more domain enquiries per day than there were seven years ago, and intends to raise registry fees next month.

Domain tasting is frequently associated with criminal activities, such as phishing (creating replicas of secure sites such as banking login pages in order to harvest visitors' private details). This forces many businesses to register Domain Names defensively, concerned that domains similar to their own will be used maliciously.

ICANN intends to look for ways to counteract these costs to businesses.