Sunday, September 10, 2006

A simple solution to "Domain Kiting"?

Bob Parsons - president of GoDaddy.com - recently posted about what he has called "Domain Kiting". I personally wasn't familiar with this term prior to reading this post, or "Check Kiting" either but I guess its probably just an Americanism that hasn't made it over to the UK.

Anyway - this article outlines what domain kiting actually is in a fairly simple and easy to understand. I'm not going to go over it again here, if you don't know just go and read the article. Parsons claims in his article that domain kiting is "out of control" and "must be stopped", but he doesn't go into any detail about. From what I can infer from his post, it looks like he wants to lean on ICANN to try and get them to shut down particular registrars who appear to be responsible for - or are at least facilitating - this process. That's a fair enough point, but then you remember that Parsons runs his own registrar and is maybe just looking to take out some competition? :) Maybe I am being a bit harsh!

But anyway it got me thinking - surely there is a really simple way to solve this problem without resorting to oppressive actions from ICANN, who appear to be pretty unresponsive anyway.

Perhaps a better way to prevent this is to simply set a "block" on all cancelled domains, so they cant be reused for a short period?

For example, say a domain kiter registered the domain "domainkiting.com" with the intention of "kiting" it over and over and over:

  1. Kiter registers "domainkiting.com"
  2. Kiter cancels domain after 5 days and gets money back
  3. Registry puts a 30 day "block" on "domainkiting.com" preventing further registrations.
  4. Kiter cannot re-register domain for a month.
  5. Domain Kiting solved?
Maybe I am looking at this in a really really simplistic way - but that seems like such an obvious solution to me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

do you mean blocking JUST the company that registered it in the first place or a block to everyone?

Anonymous said...

http://DomainKiting.com is for real a website and http://RegisterFlies.info
Logo FLY is crawling around on the screen. If you kill it maybe it will go away. RegisterFly is not the company behind DomainKiting.com or http://GoDummy.com all these names seem to be registered at Godaddy.