Domain Tasting

Domain tasting was a loophole business. Register a hundred thousand names, park them, watch the traffic for four days, keep the few hundred that earned more than a renewal, and delete the rest inside the Add Grace Period for a full refund. Repeat weekly.

At its peak around 2007 the majority of all .com registrations in a given month were tasting registrations. It clogged the drop, kept good names out of circulation and made a handful of people a lot of money.

ICANN ended it in 2009 by charging registrars the full fee on any deletes above a small percentage of their new registrations. The volume vanished within a couple of months. If you hear the term today, it's history, or someone describing a much smaller version of the same idea done at a registrar that still allows refunds.