Dynadot

Donuts Dropzone Service?

Spaceship Spaceship
Watch

Namefy.com

Upgraded Member
Impact
185
I am trying to back order a domain and when I checked the whois this morning it changed status only to say

"This domain is currently available for application via the Donuts Dropzone service."

Where do I find the Donuts dropzone service to backorder it? Or do they just provide an API to registrars?
 
1
•••
The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
guess the question is moot at this point, tried using snapnames and it was caught by sav.com :/
 
0
•••
I have the same question.
 
0
•••
The Donuts dropzone is only avalaible to registrars.
 
5
•••
Couple comments:

1: I can see that the messaging is confusing to end-users because there is no means for them to access "Donuts Dropzone".

2: They'll likely revise that to the new name (that seems like Yoda gave them) "Identity Digital" as they are sweeping through and renaming the partentco parts of the conglomeration.

I am not dunkin' on donuts here (pardon that, I could not resist), but some background might be helpful.

For those unfamiliar, Dropzone was originally proposed in .org to combat and disincentivize "domain tasting" during the add-grace period, and has slowly morphed over time to become a means for the registry to extract a premium add-on fee for access to the domain roughly 24h before it goes into the general availabilty.

Dropzone was a security remedy as it was initially approved by ICANN in their RSEP process for use with .ORG in that form. Call that dropzone v1

Changes to the Add-Grace period thresholds limited 'tasting' refunds to a percentage of domains registered by a registrar, and ICANN made the fee they charge non-refundable in the span since, which eliminated 99.7% of the tasting activity that had provided the rationale for this dropzone in the first place.

Subsequently to this being introduced in .org, Afilias, the back end provider for .ORG submitted a version for their TLDs like .INFO, .MOBI, .BLUE etc that underwent a few evolutions that gradually introduced a means to grant the registry the ability to throttle, approve or decline access to that registrar. Call that dropzone v2

Subsequently, Donuts and Afilias held hands in bathing suits in Ethos' swimming pool, and gave birth to all the donuts TLDs having dropzone v3 and somewhere between v2 and v3 there was a new 24h period added to the domain name lifecycle that exists between the pending delete and the general availability were price surcharge per name introduced into dropzone for first come, first served registration.

So, two flavors of drop catching now are alive, first a method with a premium fee being collected by the registry to participate in the first skim of the inventory before the names are available to second (legacy method), the standard drop catching.

So now registry be gettin' paid, and the status quo eroded the shoreline on the dropcatching businesses.

Although name.com shares common ownership, and this system changed the equitible access in a manner that altered the odds of catching premium names in a manner that could advantage individual registrars (for a fee), ICANN did not see any need to put this under scrutiny by any competition authority and rubber stamped the donuts drop catch fee collection system aka dropzone.

The issue here is more one of confusing messaging, but under the hood there might be something to look at...

Does the approved version 1 of dropzone in .org just get considered as being fine to apply v3 with the fees because "ICANN already approved this"?

Interesting thought experiment.
 
5
•••
0
•••
Back