[extraduder_ire]

Does any money change hands for this kind of front-running? If so, I think there's a good opportunity to either cost them a ton of money or drain whatever budget they allocate to this practice by baiting out registrations.

[dspillett]

Originally it did, and some companies still tried the buy-from-under-and-jack-up-the-price thing on what could be valuable domains. Back then I checked the availability of a four-character (letter-letter-number-number) domain and two days later found it taken by “someone” using the same registrar I check it was free on and there was a holding page there offering it for sale at a not-insignificant cost multiplier. Luckily I had other options and just took one of those (from a different registrar). I also checked the availability of other domains on the original registrar, and encouraged others to also. We probably didn't cause enough financial disruption for someone to notice, but I liked the petty revenge anyway!

Later the 5-day grace period was added by ICANN to deal with accidental registrations, a full refund would be given if the domain was released in that time. Supposedly to protect end users against mistakes like typos and other errors, though I'm not sure why that would need five full days. This made “domain tasting” an open season and a great many registrars would do it, even registering a few times to extend the five days. Some actually did it as an advantage for the end user: they were not going to get snipped by waiting a few days and the registrar didn't jack up the price. But many were a bit more nefarious.

They later added a small processing fee to the refunds in the grace period after the first few domains per account per period (or similar) which vastly reduced this happening, so it is now pretty much a historic problem.

[danaris]

If I remember correctly (probably from stories on HN a few years ago), GoDaddy had the ability to "taste" the domains—ie, pay for them, hold them for a few days, then get a full refund if you didn't end up buying through them. I don't recall whether this was something special for large registrars like GoDaddy.

[eli]

ICANN added a small nonrefundable fee many years ago that made this no longer practical on a large scale.

[btown]

I'm sure tasting still happens on dropped domains, though; registrars have data on search interest and can find dropped domains that are likely to be profitable even taking transaction fees into account.

[eli]

It's unfair that registrars can abuse their position to pick up valuable dropped domains. But somebody was going to do it in the moment after they drop if not them. That feels like a different and less serious problem.