[policy] When Tech Meets Policy...

Mon Aug 13 17:46:11 UTC 2007

That's exactly the problem.... "the goal of tasting is to collect pay
per click ad revenue"...

Ten years ago the internet was for porn, now it's for
MLM/Affiliate/PPC scams.  As long as we put up with companies abusing
the Internet as long as they are making a buck, they'll keep doing it.
 The scams will change, but they'll still be scaming.

On 12 Aug 2007 13:41:17 -0000, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>
> > I'd like to but I don't know of a practical way to measure the
> > impact of domain tasting on my services: how can I do 6 million
> > whois lookups to analyse a day's logs to find what proportion of our
> > email comes "from" tasty domains?
>
> Probably not much.  Domain tasting requires a registrar who is willing
> to handle millions of AGP refunds without charging the registrant,
> which effectively rules out anyone who isn't a registrar himself.  The
> goal of tasting is to collect pay per click ad revenue, which requires
> that one have a stable enough identity to have Adsense et al pay you.
> Spam these days all comes from zombies with real but irrelevant return
> addresses, and the target URLs are more likely to be bought with
> stolen credit cards.
>
> The problems with domain tasting more affect web users, with vast
> number of typosquat parking pages flickering in and out of existence.
>
> The real way to get rid of tasting would be to persuade Google and
> Yahoo/Overture to stop paying for clicks on pages with no content
> other than ads, but that would be far too reasonable.
>
> R's,
> John
>
>