Entrepreneurs Profit From Free Web Names

Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer at MarkMonitor,a brand protection firm, poses for a portrait in the company's offices in San Francisco, Calif., Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007. Entrepreneurs have been taking advantage of a five-day grace period to sample millions of domain names, keeping the relative few that might generate advertising revenues and dropping the rest before paying. Experts believe spammers and scam artists are also starting to use the grace period as a source of free, disposable Web addresses. Felman believes the system allows people with criminal or speculative intent to dominate. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) (Marcio Jose Sanchez - AP)

Critics of the system say VeriSign and ICANN both benefit from the thousands of names that are tasted and kept, collecting fees proportional to the number of names sold.

VeriSign said decisions should follow community-wide discussions.

"The risk is you don't want to necessarily move too fast or have a knee-jerk reaction without understanding the ramification," said Michael Denning, general manager with VeriSign's Digital Brand Management Services, which encourages companies to register additional domain names before tasters can get to them.

The practice, meanwhile, shows no signs of waning.

A newer variant, sometimes called "kiting," involves the same company reregistering the same name every fourth or fifth day to hang onto it in perpetuity, without ever paying for it.

Anti-spam experts also suggest that spammers and scam artists are turning to the loophole to register new names every couple of days to avoid detection.

"We see them using hundreds and hundreds of domains, and even at $5 a domain, that's costing them thousands of dollars, which they probably don't want to be losing," said Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs Ltd.

Steele, the Neiman Marcus lawyer, said many of the dispute-resolution rules written for the pre-tasting days are no longer effective.

"By the time you expend the time and effort to track and figure out who's going after what names, they have moved on," he said. "A day where 100 Neiman Marcus names get registered is not an uncommon day."

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Anick Jesdanun can be reached at netwriter(at)ap.org