Porn-Napping: Why & How?

A big thanks to Drew Einhorn for sending me a link to Snapnames.com, and organization that helps people obtain domain names they wish to acquire and protect their current domain name holdings. They offer a series of reports that provide great insight into the root causes of the current problem.

After reading the reports, there is still much I do not understand, but what follows is my "Reader's Digest" interpretation of what is happening.

1) For the first time ever, domain names are expiring faster than they are being renewed.This is resulting in a rush by speculators to purchase them. On Aug 30, 2001, 160,000 names were released by VeriSign.  Within 24 hours 40,000 of them had been purchased.

2) Speculators have stumbled on a little known clause in the registration agreements that allow them to delete a registration within a 5 day grace period and get a refund. Of the 40,000 purchase in item 1 above, 25,000 were returned.

3) Some speculators are using scripts to monitor expirations.  They purchase them the millisecond the become available, put up their porn fronts and monitor the click-through activity.  Any site that doesn't generate enough click-throughs is returned for credit within the 5 day grace period.  

4) Some speculators are even going as far as returning them within the 5 day period and immediately reacquiring them, thus setting up an endless cycle that doesn't cost them a penny, but generates money through the click-throughs on the banner ads.

5) In Sept. 2001, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN ) met to discuss the problem of names expiring faster than they were being renewed, along with the financial impact and technical problems generated.  They viewed the problem strictly from a bottom line of the ledger and technical standpoint.  They made a conscious decision to ignore the impact on customers.

During the meeting, they sought to define and solve the problem. As part of that process, they settled on a set of criteria for the solution. To me, this is the telling part of the story.  Here are criteria they specifically REJECTED as part of the solution.

The solution:

  • Should result in equal access to the secondary market, rather than in preferential access to speculators
  • Should maintain or repair, in the customers' eyes, the legitimacy of the industry and its procedures for fairly distributing deleted names.
  • Should result in improved customer experience all around, form the improved predictability and certainty businesses who know whether they will get the names they want to answering customer demand for secondary market of the deleting names.
  • Should maximize the revenue (and correspondingly the customer service) of the industry.

    • I invite you to visit the reports linked to at the top of the page and determine whether my view is accurate.

    Art Wolinsky
    awolinsky@oii.org

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    Last updated 3/21/06