“(Reporting from the ICANN Meeting in San Juan, Puerto-Rico). When PIR, the .Org Registry asked for an amendment to its contract with ICANN, the decision was met with little fanfare.

Nevertheless, the Registry’s decision to charge a five 5 cents deletion fee per domain to Registrars who would delete more than 90% of the domains registered in a month can be seen as some kind of Domainer Tax and was highly talked about this week in the ICANN corridors.

Indeed, when thousands of domains are tasted per month, a mere 5 cents can represent a lot of money in the end. From what we have heard, as far as PIR is concerned, the amendment, implemented a month ago, is already deemed successful as it is responsible for quite a dramatic down in domain names deletion.

While the Registry is currently happy with the outcome, it could move the threshold from 90% to a lesser number to make an even stronger deterent to Tasting. A solution that other gTLDs are reportedly looking into, with the strong backing of the Intellectual Property Constituency. ”

Source DomainNews