The meddlesome practice of Domain Tasting has ballooned from around 100,000 per day in 2004, to in excess of four million per day today.  Domain Tasting describes the practice of domain speculators who abuse the 5 day grace period during which a domain may be returned for a refund of the registration fee.  The speculators use this period to test expiring and other domains to see which ones have any residual or typo traffic.  The issue is finally getting some attention in the media, but ICANN continues to permit the practice.   Verisign, which manages the .com domain, and has an estimated $25 million on deposit at any one time from domain tasters is not eager to push for a change (the annual interest on $25 million is, well, enough to buy a few fruit baskets for the powers that be at ICANN) .  In the meantime, the Internet and our search results are clogged with meaningless typo and jibber jabber domains seeking an elusive click or two that will provide the domain speculator with something more than the $6 per year registration fee.  We could sure use a few million more sites like those. . ..

Image courtesy of SuperCapacity under Creative Commons