Over the last year, Internet Commerce Association has been actively campaigning for ICANN to stop domain tasting. Now word is out that an unlikely player may stop the practice that has led to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of abusive domain registrations. Is Google planning to take action to bring an end to the abuse of the add/delete grace period that has given our industry a black eye? Jay Westerdal says “A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less than five days old.” at DomainTools Blog.
Google seems like an unlikely candidate to stop domain tasting because they make a lot of money from the practice, probably more than all of the other entities involved in domain tasting combined. When faced with lawsuits from trademark owners charging infringing advertising shown on search results pages, Google chose not to remove the offending ads, but to fight the IP interests in court. Google won these cases in most countries including the US. Google continues to sell ads on trademarked keywords where it can. Yahoo does not sell ads on trademarked keywords and this gives Google a great advantage when it comes to monetizing traffic from domains that contain trademarked keywords.
Google should be applauded for giving up this advantage for five days, but the most helpful thing that Google could do for the domain industry is to help eliminate the display of infringing content on parked domains. They have the capability and the market position to do something good.
It seems unfortunate that traffic from non-offending domains will be lost as a cost of this policy. However, with most registrars no longer deleting domains with traffic and after a couple years of tasters trawling the domain pool, there are not many new domains with traffic anyway.