Just read an interesting post (<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html">http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html</a><!-- m -->) on Bob Parson's blog (founder of Godaddy). Apparently registrars can register a domain name and cancel within 5 days to get their money back. However they then can register the domain immediately again. Doing this over and over for millions of domains. Bob Parson calls this "domain kiting". According to him, 35 million domains were registered in April 2006 of which 32.7 million were not permanently registered and were thus involved in domain kiting.
All this really explains why there are so many domains being cybersquatted. I previously thought most domains in the hands of cybersquatters would lose them some money, but that domains with traffic would make up for that. However, if this is true one can "try out" freely millions of domains for a limitless time and then proceed to actually buy the most lucrative domains. This purchase ofcourse being to prevent the domain from being registered by another party.
In my opinion this is really bad for the Internet and for us webmasters. I hope something will be done about it. What do you think?
All this really explains why there are so many domains being cybersquatted. I previously thought most domains in the hands of cybersquatters would lose them some money, but that domains with traffic would make up for that. However, if this is true one can "try out" freely millions of domains for a limitless time and then proceed to actually buy the most lucrative domains. This purchase ofcourse being to prevent the domain from being registered by another party.
In my opinion this is really bad for the Internet and for us webmasters. I hope something will be done about it. What do you think?