We have taken industry-leading action to prevent 'domain tasting', to put a stop to the potential abuse of our automated registration service.  Domain tasting is the practice of registering domain names, assessing revenue generation potential and, if they create an insufficient return, deleting the domain names before the registry requests payment. 

Deleting domains registered in error
We provide registrars with the facility to delete domain names registered in error before they have been invoiced.  This allows, for example, domain names containing spelling mistakes to be deleted and then re-registered with the correct spelling.  Domain names deleted in this way do not incur a registration fee.

Unnecessary loads
Previously there had been no limit on the number of domain names that can be deleted.  However, it has become clear that some registrars have abused this facility by domain tasting.  This practice is a breach of our acceptable use policies and places unnecessary load on our systems, potentially jeopardising access for other users.

Action
As a result in August 2006 we introduced a limit on the number of registrations that can be deleted by registrars.  We felt it necessary to take firm action against this practice and therefore the limit of deletions for practices such as domain tasting is zero.  If we detect any uses of the delete operation on our automatic system other than the correction of registration errors, we will take action against the registrar.