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Domain tasting is big business for domain registrars and scammers. Here's the definition of domain tasting according to Wikipedia:

Domain tasting, is a practice of registrants using the five-day "grace period" at the beginning of a domain registration for ICANN-regulated generic top-level domains to test the marketability of a domain name. During this period, when a registration must be fully refunded by the domain registry, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted by the registrant on the viability of deriving income from advertisements being placed on the domain's web site.

Imagine this scenario - your strategy team is sitting in a brainstorming session to come up with a strong brand to support one of your online advocacy campaigns. You spend valuable time analyzing various permutations of words to identify a domain the entire team ultimately agrees upon. You open your laptop, go to Network Solutions and run a simple WHOIS to see if the domain is available. The good news is that it's available. The bad news is that Network Solutions is already in the process of domain tasting, purchasing that domain and parking it for the five-day grace period in the hopes that you will use their services to purchase and manage your domain. If this does not scream unethical business practice, I don't know what does.

I tested this out to see the results for myself. As a control in my experiment, I ran a simple WHOIS query for ihatedomaintasting.com on my Linux command line, and sure enough it was available. Here's the output, just to show you the timestamp:

No match for "IHATEDOMAINTASTING.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:36:41 UTC <<<

Next, I went to Network Solutions and used their service to see if the domain was available, and obviously, it still was. I went down the hall for a quick cup of coffee and returned to run a command line WHOIS again, and I was stunned to see the domain was no longer available. Here's the output of the second WHOIS:

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Network Solutions, LLC           
13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
HERNDON, VA 20171
US
1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620

Record expires on 11-Jan-2009.
Record created on 11-Jan-2008.
Database last updated on 11-Jan-2008 10:38:28 EST.

Less than a minute after I used the Network Solutions service to check the domain's availability, they clandestinely registered my domain using the five-day grace period and essentially held it hostage. Now my options were limited. I could either continue the process of registering it through Network Solutions (typically, the most expensive registrar at $35 per year), or wait for the five-day grace period to expire and hope domain scammers aren't tracking domain searches in order to snap up my domain for their own purposes.

Network Solutions secretly implemented the software to register these domains searches in December and their CEO, Champ Mitchell, claims this was done in an effort to cut down on domain name scamming that has plagued the industry over the past two years. I'm sure the irony of this situation does not fall on deaf ears.

It's highly possible that five days later my domain will be available, however the frustration of having my domain held hostage for this five day period, after which I run the risk of losing the domain is unacceptable to me.

The obvious lesson here is to stay away from using Network Solutions' service. For those of you that know how to run a command line WHOIS in Linux on a Mac (go to the Finder, in the top Go menu select Utilities. Double click on terminal and a command line prompt will come up. Type 'whois ihatedomaintasting.com' and you should see your results), do so. If you aren't comfortable doing this, try instantdomainsearch.com.

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