It’s sad when policies meant to protect legitimate buyers of something are abused. There is a five day trial period to be able to dump a new domain if it’s not what you wanted. This process is being used to sample domains with Google and Yahoo paid search ads. You know those pages that come up for mistyped domains that show you nothing but ads?

The grace period was originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. But with computer automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs have turned the return policy into a loophole for generating big bucks.

Personally, I don’t care for domain parking pages with ads but it is a very profitable market. One way to cut down this exploit might be to allow only a certain number of trial returns per company per year. I can’t imagine businesses that aren’t exploiting this loophole choosing a domain and returning it within five days that many times in a year. I’ve never used this trial period and we’ve bought many domains over the years.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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