Mark: A domain name has come to have an intrinsic commercial value based on a the number of times people type it randomly; this in turn is determined by a number of attributes including its length, the characters it's made of, current fashion and style, etc.

There is also a small number of commercial organisations who provide "gateways" to these strings, in the form of the root DNS servers and the DNS servers for the .com TLD. These organisations already know which domain names are being mistyped because each typo is sent straight to them. But they hoard this information. They have an entrenched, un-elected commercial advantage over everyone else.

The DNS has therefore become a private database of valuable strings, owned by a few large corporations. We rent those strings from companies who already know the commercial value of the strings, but don't want to tell us.

So rather than being inconsistent with private property, I think that domain name tasting is actually a legitimate use of the system, similar to performing due diligence when buying a business, or an inspection before renting a commercial property. Rather than banning it, I think that it should probably be made an explicit part of the purchase process.

As for companies registering a million sites and then dumping them -- so what? The non-valuable names become available for use again. I don't see how this affects Ms Navarro unless she, too, wanted to make sales based on randomly entered domain names.

cam: Their human interest was stupid and missed the point entirely of domain tasting. Because companies are churning domains; sticking advertising on them for free and then handing them back, they are not owning them. It is not property, they are basically renting them for free. ICANN are stupid for allowing it.