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Re: [policy] When Tech Meets Policy...

  • From: Steve Atkins
  • Date: Wed Aug 15 16:52:45 2007



On Aug 15, 2007, at 12:38 PM, Al Iverson wrote:


On 8/15/07, Barry Shein <[email protected]> wrote:
I am not sure tasting is criminal or fraud.

Neither am I, we agree. I meant if there's subsequent criminality or fraud that should be dealt with separately.

Dumb question, not necessarily looking to call you or anyone out, but I'm curious: What valid, legitimate, or likely to be used non-criminal reasons are there for domain tasting?

Working out which domains tend to get a lot of traffic, so that you can put profitable content on those that tend to have people stumble across them.

This is definitely not criminal. It's certainly a valid, legitimate
business approach under the current domain registration
model.

Then my next question is, what reasons are there where it'd be
wise/useful/non-criminal to do it on a large scale?

It's only likely profitable to do the above if you can amortize your fixed costs over a fair number of profitable domains, and you'll likely need to measure traffic on a large number of domains to find those.

(My understanding was that most, if not all, of the "domain
tasting" churn was actually done by registrars, either directly
or using a "partner" to do the grunt work. That would mean
that the costs were offloaded onto the registry. ICBW.)

Cheers,
  Steve