CADNA Launches National Campaign Against Domain Abuse
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Squatting generally involves taking a name such as verizon.com and registering misspellings and typos, such as verizom.com. The coalition claims squatting is a major growth industry and that existing legislation has been a failure. The coalition calls for further legislation to increase damages against registrars and registrants involved in these practices. The announcement of the launch of the coalition specifically targets domain kiting (the same thing I have always called domain tasting), a loophole in the registration process which allows a registrant, with the cooperation of a registrar, to try a domain out for 5 days and then release it for a refund of the registry fee if the traffic doesn't warrant the full fee. The cost structure makes it practical to have programs automatically register domains, put up Web sites and monitor the results. A huge number of domains are tasted every day. There's a clear step involved from such kiting/tasting practices to name squatting, but the coalition views kiting as an enabling technology for squatting. I'm not sure how much of a point they have, but it really doesn't matter. Kiting is abusive and unfair to the general public. ICANN and VeriSign have had the ability to end squatting for years but obviously see it as being in their financial interest. So the coalition will endeavor to put pressure on ICANN to end it. They also assert that squatting costs members over $1 billion a year because of diverted sales, loss of "hard earned trust" and increased enforcement expenses. This is hard to verify. A blog on Domain Name Wire, a "domainer" blog, has a defensive tone about CADNA and worries about legitimate domainers getting thrown in the barrel with the bad apples. They do conclude that an end to kiting is the right way to go, and good for them. They're right that the number of organizations involved in kiting is small, but their abusive footprint is large. |
