[CPWG] Reminder: ACTION/CPWG by Today 23:59 UTC: Comment on Metrics

[John McCormac]

On 25/09/2020 14:11, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond wrote:
> Dear John,
> 
> thank you for this very interesting contribution. I wondered about one 
> paragraph:
> 
> On 25/09/2020 04:34, John McCormac wrote:
>> The number of US registrars, according to the May 2020 ICANN reports 
>> is 1,931. The second place goes to China with 63. The majority of 
>> ICANN registars are drop catchers. They exist only to register 
>> deleting domain names and are not retail registrars. (The table for 
>> the breakdowns by country/COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO/MOBI/ASIA are on the 
>> front page of HosterStats.) 
> 
> Could you please explain this? They register deleted domain names - for 
> themselves? - and are *not* retail registrars? I thought the function of 
> a registrar is to sell to domain name registrants either directly or 
> through agents?

Deleting domain names have some value, Olivier,
Some of that value is in their search engine backlink profile and then 
there's the value of the domain name for resale purposes.

The drop catchers/auction sites take pre-orders on domain names and then 
they try to register these deleting domain names. The domain names will 
then either go to the person who placed the order or to auction if there 
are multiple back orders or the domain name is considered to be of high 
value.

The more registrar connections that an operation has to the registry 
backend, the higher the chances of registering a newly deleted domain 
name. The scale of the dropcatcher registrars can be seen in the ICANN 
accredited registars CSV file. ( https://www.internic.net/registrars.csv )

Loading the CSV file into an Excel spreadsheet and converting it to a 
table (highlight the data and Control+L in Excel) provides a sortable 
table. By sorting on URL or e-mail, it is possible to see the clusters 
of dropcatcher registrars.

The dropcatcher registrars are feeding the domain names back to their 
main auction/sales operation. Many of them do not have unique or 
separate registar URLs in the URL field.

Regards...jmcc
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