Understanding domain registration abuses

The ability to monetize domain names through resale or serving ad content has contributed to the rise of questionable practices in acquiring them, including domain-name speculation, tasting, and front running. In this paper, we perform one of the first comprehensive studies of these domain registration practices. In order to characterize the prevalence of domain-name speculation, we derive rules describing “hot” topics from popular Google search queries and apply these rules to a dataset containing all .com registrations for an eight-month period in 2008. We also study the extent of domain tasting throughout this time period and analyze the efficacy of ICANN policies intended to limit tasting activity. Finally, we automatically generate high-quality domain names related to current events in order to measure domain front running by registrars. The results of our experiments shed light on the methods and motivations behind these domain registration practices and, in some cases, underscore the difficulty in definitively measuring these questionable behaviors.