ICANN Tries to Put An End to Domain Tasting and Opens the Door to New gTLDs

It is an exciting time for the development of the Internet, and it has gone almost unnoticed.  A number of developments in the domain name world have occurred today.  ICANN has paved the way to outlaw domain tasting at its Paris meeting this afternoon.  In April 2007, a supermajority of the GNSO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) council voted to discourage domain purchase grace periods in which refunds are given for the purchase of a domain within a set number of days, typically five.  In May 2007, ICANN's at-large advisory committee again asked the GNSO to look at the domain tasting issue, and they came up with five problem areas to address in regards to domain tasting.  Today, ICANN enacted a proposal that will prohibit those registrars that offer the grace periods from offering a refund for domain names that exceed 10% of the registrar's net registrations for the month or, alternatively, 50 domain names, whichever is greater.

Additionally, the ICANN board voted to approve a massive expansion to the available domain names.  This new expansion, which must still be ratified by the ICANN board (expected in 2009), will allow applicants to the gTLD process to select their own suffixes.  This recommendation paves the way to allow trademark holders to select more marketable suffixes, e.g. diet.pepsi or pumps.reebok, and it allows cities to apply for suffixes (e.g. .newyork & .chicago).  It will be interesting to see how this affects trademark holders, and how it will affect the value of the current premium TLDs such as .com.