Is tasting still going on?

Snapnames alias web.com alias NetSol still does that.
On snapnames they have a special category called Daily deals.
If no one bid, they drop the names after 5 days

Oh I didn't know that, thanks for letting me know, much appreciated. I guess on average it must still be profitable for them if enough people are buying names from the Daily Deals section.

I am tagging @jmcc as I know he has looked very extensively on the topic of domain tasting (he is currently writing a chapter on it for his forthcoming book). I am sure he can add some insights on how extensively it still happens.

Bob

Thank you Bob, looking forward to this.

Epik offers limited tasting, you can still try 'em out before you buy (pay ICANN fees):

https://www.namepros.com/threads/pr...searching-at-registrars.1140542/#post-7270359

Interesting, thanks for that!

It is still happening but on a much smaller scale than the peak. On some months during the peak, over 50 million domain names were being tasted in a single month. It was a highly organised business and it benefited from ICANN being completely unable to do anything about it. It was taking advantage of the Add Grace Period to taste and delete domain names for a net zero cost. The registrars would taste the domain names and then get a credit for each domain name deleted in the AGP. Basically, ICANN introduced a system where excessive deletions would not get a refund and it also introduced a transaction charge. The irony was that large scale tasting was dead before ICANN ever got around to doing anything about it. Dell and Alienware took a court case against a number of registrars who were doing 10 million domain names a month for trademark infringement in October 2007. After that, things started declining rapidly because other tasters knew that they'd be next. ( https://www.pcworld.com/article/142181/article.html )

The system is still being hijacked but not to the same extent. Expiring domain names with traffic are now shifted to auction sites whereas before the tasters would be competing with others to get these expiring domain names as they dropped.

Regards...jmcc

Thank you for this detailed response, definitely much appreciated info.

Some registrar do charge for grace delete

True, I think some allow for a small number to be deleted for free and after that they charge for it.