Hi folks, Just following up on some statements from today's transcript: On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 3:51 PM, Terri Agnew <terri.agnew@icann.org> wrote:
Adobe Connect chat transcript for 12 July 2017: ... Jeff Neuman:My belief is that we have a huge rate of people abandoning is because (i) registrars were mining the system, (ii) registrants were mining the system to see what was valuable, and to a lesser extent as a result of the claim (either legitimiate or not)
Jeff Neuman:But I cant prove any of those theories
Kathy Kleiman:@Jeff: we have gathered evidence already from registries; there is probably more
Jeff Neuman:There just is no way to do so on a backwards basis
If one had access to the raw data (and presumably The Analysis Group would have had it, to generate their reports), one could filter such "mining" by examining abandonment rates by (1) registrar and (2) by time relative to the launch date. i.e. presumably those were "mining" the system were not spreading out their queries across all registrars equally. It would be easy to identify the outliers. Furthermore, registrants would be also focused on a few registrars that permit those bulk lookups, and they wouldn't spread their queries over time equally --- they'd be focused at the launch (i.e. the beginning, first few days, etc.) of a TLD. Of course, if need be, one could anonymize the data by registrar (i.e. Registrar 1, Registrar 2, etc.), if there are any concerns about revealing their individual abandonment rates. Registry operators and registrars both have technology to block WHOIS access to those who are "mining" that data. One can use similar detection techniques in this instance. Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/