[Vanderson]

At one time if you even _looked up_ the availability of a domain name they would immediately register it so if you tried to then register it at Namecheap or GoDaddy the name was taken already.

That should be illegal. (I have not bothered testing if their system still does this)

[tablespoon]

> At one time if you even _looked up_ the availability of a domain name they would immediately register it so if you tried to then register it at Namecheap or GoDaddy the name was taken already.

What would be their overhead for doing that? Seems like it's something that could be fun to subvert until they stop (e.g. do lookups of UUIDs in a loop).

[greyface-]

It costs them nothing as long as they delete the domain within a few days of registration. https://icannwiki.org/Add_Grace_Period

[utucuro]

According to the page you linked, that seems to fall under abuse of the grace period.