Domain buyers saw a big chunk of their revenue fade when Google declared an end to permitting its AdSense product to be placed on domains that had not been open for six days. A five-day add grace period (AGP) permitted domain buyers to hold the domain for five days, see if it could draw enough traffic to be profitable, and dump it for a full refund if it did not.

Other domainers “kite” their domains, dumping and re-registering the same ones over and over. Even without Google, plenty of ad opportunities exist to make the business profitable at volume.

Such volume may be the weak point that can be broken with a suitable application of force. In the case of Network Solutions, the big registrar hopes to persuade the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board of directors to keep a provision in its fiscal year 2009 budget to thwart domain tasting.

“This budget includes a provision to make the non-refundable 20 cent per-transaction ICANN fee applicable to domain names deleted during the AGP once the level of deletions exceeds 10 percent of a registrar

Brand protection firm MarkMonitor recently released the latest version of its Brandjacking quarterly survey. Among the company’s findings, company CMO Fred Felman told WebProNews they witnessed a significant year over year drop in domain kiting, which is the serial registration of the same domains over and over again.

This drop corresponded with another declining form of brand abuse. Kiters regularly placed the Google product AdSense for Domains onto their continuously registered domains. They essentially kept the domain name perpetually registered, at minimal cost, while reaping click-through profits from the ad placement.

Google shut that window when it began requiring domains to be open for six days before being considered for acceptance into AdSense for Domains. MarkMonitor’s numbers showed the impact: for the first quarter of 2008, pay per click abuse dropped by 42 percent year over year, by their research.

Other abuses happened through the mechanism of search engine optimization. Someone looking for adult traffic, in an example shared by Felman, set up a site stuffed with travel keywords. The site served its purpose, gaining valuable placement in the search rankings and driving traffic to it.

Once that traffic began arriving in volume, helped along with a spam campaighn, the domain owner swapped out the keyword-stuffed content for adult advertising. Visitors expecting to find something related to travel received an eyeful of scantily clad woman and plenty of links to adult sites.

Felman said MarkMonitor sees this brand abuse happen a lot. People game SEO with gibberish search terms. He also contended the travel-turned-adult site work was a planned tactic, with no change in registration when the site flipped content.

As people look for travel deals online, Felman suggested they avoid purchasing airline travel vouchers from auction sites. Despite the purported discount, such vouchers are not transferable to others. Felman said MarkMonitor gave it a try to see if such a voucher purchased this way would work.

It didn’t. Avoid such auctions when planning your vacation this summer. They simply serve as a way to move money from innocent people to scammers.

That’s about a $28 price increase, depending on where one does his domaining. The four-day hold is based on ICANN’s five-day grace period, during which refunds are available if domainers change their mind.

NetSol says it instituted the practice to protect customers from "front-running," an opportunistic tactic that involves trolling the WHOIS registry for recently queried domains with the intention of buying those domains and hiking up the price.

During the aforementioned grace period, front-runners might also test the monetizability of a domain, based on PPC ads and/or traffic, a practice known as domain tasting. If unprofitable, domain tasters would release the domain within the grace period. Other times, they may keep a domain tied up in perpetuity, also by manipulating the grace period.

Critics of Network Solutions saw little difference. The company was registering queried domains, raising the price during the grace period, placing an advertisement on the domain page, and then releasing the domain back into the wild.

NetSol denied accusations that they were also front-running, domain kiting, or domain tasting, but were merely providing protection for customers. Assumedly, the nearly $30 price-hike was the fee for that protection.

But after enough heat, spokesperson Susan Wade says that NetSol is working on "improvements to our protection measure." This includes only registering domains searched for on the NetSol homepage, and not via the WHOIS lookup, also on the site. Instead of a promotional page on the domains, the company will only place an "under construction" notification, and the reserved domain names will not resolve.

Still, NetSol has done little to differentiate between what the company is doing and the practice of front-running. Technically, they sound pretty much the same.

ICANN has announced their intention to look into the practice of domain tasting and other ways domainers manipulate its grace period. But don’t expect them to do anything soon. They don’t seem to be in any real hurry.   
 

Critics call it "extortion," but Network Solutions calls it a service to protect customers from the practice of "front running." The extra charge is, assumedly, the protection fee — you know, just like the one the mob offers.

On his blog, Shashi Bellamkonda, who works for Network Solutions, defines "front running" this way:

“Front Running” occurs when a domain name is registered, typically by someone outside of the United States, just minutes or hours after someone else has conducted a domain name search at a registrar site or has performed a WHOIS query for the domain. The reason people “front run” domains is to conduct what is called “tasting” to see how much money they can make on a domain name through pay-per-click ads or by re-selling the domain in the aftermarket at a highly marked up price.

But this is different, he says.

Several angry bloggers have posted about it, including Domain Tools’ Jay Westerdal (listed here as one of the Internet’s youngest and richest entrepreneurs) and well-known search engine marketing manager Bill Hartzer, of MarketNet.

They, along with several others, tested and confirmed that when they conducted a WHOIS search on Network Solution’s site but didn’t register it, Network Solutions would register it immediately and offer it for sale for $34.99, nearly $30 above the going price, depending on where you buy.

Immediately, as illustrated in several comment threads, critics were searching for domains like domainkitingiswrong.com and various expletive phrases paired up with NetworkSolutions, all of which, at least temporarily are/were owned by the company afterwards.

Though critics are challenging the ethics of the practice, especially when it comes from one of the largest and oldest domain registrars around, and labeling it front running, extortion, domain kiting, and domain tasting, a spokesperson called it "a customer protection measure to protect customers from frontrunners."

The company line from Bellamkonda and from spokesperson Susan Wade is that what Network Solutions is doing is different from frontrunning or domain tasting in that they release the domain at the conclusion of ICANN’s grace period and do not monetize or domains.
 

Still, people are pretty upset with them. Hartzer believes that Network Solutions may reverse the new policy based on customer backlash, but the controversy could also have a more positive impact. "It’s bringing the domain tasting and kiting issue to the forefront," he said. "ICANN domain tasting has been around for a while and people have been taking advantage of it."

ICANN announced in August it would be launching an investigation into the practice of domain tasting and called for examples of abuses.