Big-time crash landing for the tasting rocket

[JoshuaPz]

BREAKING NEWS: ICANN will shortly be placing serious limits on AGP deletions that will effectively eliminate large-scale domain tasting.

The below e-mail from Dynadot hit my inbox a few minutes ago:

Dear Joshua,

We have several important announcements to be made before the new year starts:

ICANN Announces a New AGP Limits Policy

ICANN has recently approved an AGP (Add Grace Period) Limits Policy which will limit the number of grace deletions a domain registrar can make without incurring a registration fee. This policy only applies to the global TLDs such as COM, NET, ORG, etc. It will probably have little to no effect on the country TLDs such as WS, CN, US, etc.

We expect this policy will be implemented by the central registries sometime in early 2009. Due to this change, we may have to raise grace deletion fees substantially or remove grace deletions altogether.

More information about this change can be found here:

AGP (Add Grace Period) Limits Policy
http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/agp-policy-17dec08-en.htm

(...remainder of e-mail snipped...)

I admit to having tasted many domains myself, but in my view this is great news. Less warehousing by Enom and Kevin Ham => greater prospects for catching dropped domains for the rest of us => freer flow of information => happier Internet.

[anatoly]

[jdk]

Good news.

[jacal1]

I only feel bad for people (like me) who need spelling help sometimes and make legit mistakes...I guess if it seems to good to be avialable I'll need to spell check...

[Ehsan]

I only feel bad for people (like me) who need spelling help sometimes and make legit mistakes...I guess if it seems to good to be avialable I'll need to spell check...

same here !

[draggar]

I only feel bad for people (like me) who need spelling help sometimes and make legit mistakes...I guess if it seems to good to be avialable I'll need to spell check...

I agree. Instead of killing it 100% maybe they should have changed the amount people get back - say 50% of the registration price?

[HuntingMoon]

it is a breath of fresh air and we are hand registering domains more than anytime in the last few years, thankfully.

[Area52]

Now that everything has been tasted.

[dotNetKing]

Yes. Good news.

Glad to see that ICANN is making decisions in the interest of the general public despite what opposition it might receive from powerful vested interests.

This should remove or drastically reduce the fear of checking if a domain is available because a taster might register it.