NameYourself said:
Interesting marketing tactic, but what the heck were those million names doing for the entire past year? Did they just decide to use up all their free .info regs and park them on their own until it came time to renew.. then give them to the customers to see if they'll pay to own / renew them? That's different, and clever at the same time.
They gave them to the customers last september and they have been available to all customers who had an account since that time - there was a special tab under "My Domains" called "Promotion" that they were under - you could opt to activate the domain and take the remaining portion of the registration free of charge, or you could choose that you did not want them at all and submit for them to be deleted altogether effective immediately.
Those that did neither left the domains in a parked status - even though they were still the registrants of the domains in the whois database.
Excerpt from enom:
The .INFO domains were part of the opportunity we had last year to acquire these types of names for you at no cost. If they were not previously activated by you, we've done so in the last two days. This is why they show up on your list of active domains instead of being listed as they were before under the Redemption/Promotion domains in your account.
You are under no obligation to renew the domains. However, if you would like to renew and use this names during the coming year, each can be processed by using the ADD YEARS button on the domain control panel (or Renew a List) . These domains will all expire by 9/28/2005 and then begin dropping from your account display naturally.
If you want them removed prior to this, please let me know by sending a line-by-line list of the names and we will handle their being deleted from your account expeditiously.
/End excerpt
Hope that helps