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 Perversão da política de cancelamento de domínio com/net/org

The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), responsible for the domain names registry infra-structure administration in the internet, created a cancellation policy that applies only to domain names ending in .com, .net, .org and .info. This policy came to be after an agreement between ICANN and the Registrars, companies specialized in registering domain names in a large scale, and allows the buyer to cancel a registered domain at no cost and up to five days from the first request.

At the same time, a new kind of advertisement strategy became popular in the Internet, the sponsored links. In this new business model, the advertiser only pays for an ad when an internet user clicks it (pay per click, or PPC), instead of the traditional price per print, or PPP. The sponsored links have become a hit for a number of reasons:

• Cost of campaign is based on its performance (Pay for Performance or P4P)
• Statewide, countrywide or international range
• Total control over the creation and maintenance of the campaign
• Real time statistics

Sponsored links may be inserted in any type of website, however, the search engines are the best option, since the cost of the campaign is based on performance and relevance of the information, because the advertiser decides which words they want their ad to be associated with.

The main search engines have their own sponsored links system, such as Google's Adwords and Yahoo's Search Marketing, formerly Overture. An interesting detail is that these systems affiliate with other websites in a partners network, throughout which the ads may be distributed. Therefore, when a sponsored link in a partner website is clicked, that website gets a part of the profit, while the rest goes to the search engine. That means any website may be a Google or Yahoo "partner" in the sales of sponsored links. Thus, the advertiser may choose between creating an advertising campaign associated with either the search engine or its respective partners network, or even both. This structure allows Google and Yahoo to broaden the reach of its channels, since millions of websites join the network.

Fact: Google's partners network is called "Adsense" and the company's negotiation power is so disproportionally large that the partners are never informed of the percentage of the profit they receive, that is, they may become a Google "partner" but will never know what their share in the company is.

But does any of that have anything to do with the domain registry market? Yes! Thousands of domain names have been registered with the sole purpose of displaying websites containing sponsored links. The logic is simple: the buyer registers a domain name and becomes a partner in Adsense system to receive part of the profit generated by their visitors clicks. The domain name is considered profitable when the sponsored links revenue exceeds the cost of the annual fee paid to maintain a domain name. This type of website, whose only content is sponsored links, is called MFA (Made For Adsense) and millions of websites like these have been created.

Making money from sponsored links has become an established industry internationally and this business model, which tends to become more and more popular in Brazil, has occasioned a change of scene in the market, as follows:

The domain registry market is in excellent shape, its better ever, and showing significant and consistent growth rates.

The value for sale of generic domain names, such as doctors.com.br and blogs.com.br , has increased considerably, since this kind of domain name is bound to be very popular among internet users, who type in the addresses directly in their browsers. Now about the perversion of the cancellation policy, title of this article:

Some companies maintain thousands of active domain names, with sponsored links completely free of charge from Adsense, for four days, even if the domain name has been cancelled. The buyers who request  a domain name registry are completely reimbursed by the company in charge of the registry, who makes the cancelled domain name available in the market within five days of the original request. These domain names, cancelled within the legal period, are never paid for by the buyers; to have an idea of the scale of the problem: in May this year alone, about 35 million domain names were registered, but only three were duly paid for. ICANN is still reticent about it. One of the consequences of this market phenomenon is that some gTLD's registry requests may not be authorized in case the buyer chooses to pay via boleto bancário, since the domain name may have already been registered, by one of these companies who pervert the cancellation policy, by the time the boleto gets paid and the domain name atributted to the buyer. On the other hand, it shows how serious the problem is. The future is uncertain, however, it doubtlessly includes sponsored links.