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 -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com **********************************************************