Process

• Originally, ICANN provided a five-day grace period for domain name registration, during which a registrant did not have to pay for the domain. During this grace period, the registrant ran advertisements and other content on a Web page to see how much it can earn. If the revenue from ads exceeded the cost of keeping the registration, the domain name was kept and successfully registered. If not, it was returned at no charge.
  
  

Effects on the Internet

• While domain tasting was in effect, it provided several benefits to its practitioners. In addition to not having to pay for a domain, a registrant could run profitability tests on a domain and choose the best domains, such as misspellings of popular websites or common words, to run ad-based operations or to purchase for resale. Domain tasting became a popular practice, quickly overwhelming the number of legitimate registrations. At its peak, they accounted for up to 99 percent of domain registrations on the Internet.
  
  

Countermeasures

• To counteract domain tasting, ICANN began to enact a fee on excessive releases made by a single company. This fee would apply if the number of deletions during the grace period rose above either 10 percent of new registrations, or 50 domains. The fee ranged from only 20 cents to the several dollars required to actually register a name. After implementing these measures, rates of domain tasting fell 99.7 percent between June 2008 and April 2009.
  
  

More Examples of Domain Name Abuse

• While domain tasting is one form of domain name abuse pursued by ICANN, there are other practices that link farms and other contentless websites use to obtain cheap domains for mass advertising. For instance, "domain kiting" refers to the process of continually registering and reregistering a domain name before the grace period runs out. "Cybersquatting" refers to the practice of reserving a potentially lucrative domain at bargain basements prices to resell it later at a higher price.