[policy] When Tech Meets Policy...

Andrew Sullivan andrew at ca.afilias.info
Wed Aug 15 20:27:22 UTC 2007


On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 02:38:48PM -0500, Al Iverson wrote:

> I'm curious: What valid, legitimate, or likely to be used non-criminal
> reasons are there for domain tasting?

Making money on the basis of the published policies of a registry?  If
this were some sort of "Web 2.0" application, everybody would be
impressed with the "mash up" the "domainers" had managed to spot: you
take a bit of capital, a grace period without any clear rules for its
application, and another application on the web (Google, in this
case), and in one go you produce revenue out of some domains and none
out of others.  By learning which ones are poor earners, you learn
things about which kinds of names are (at least currently) likely to
attract web traffic.  You therefore learn which pool of names _do_
attract traffic, and which will therefore be profitable.

It isn't plain to me that all this speculation is even bad.  When
people do it with land or stocks, we don't seem to mind too much.
>From my point of view, it's too bad that the registries have to carry
the cost without getting any benefit from it.  Some registries have
introduced methods to try to recover some of their costs when dealing
with this sort of behaviour.  But I don't believe that there's
anything criminal, or even "invalid" or "illegitimate" (whatever those
would mean in respect of domain names) going on.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
Afilias Canada                        Toronto, Ontario Canada
<andrew at ca.afilias.info>                              M2P 2A8
jabber: ajsaf at jabber.org                 +1 416 646 3304 x4110



More information about the NANOG mailing list