Abstract.
Internet domain names expire when not renewed and may be claimed by a new
owner. To date, despite existing work on abuses of residual trust after domain
ownership changes, it is not well understood how often and how fast
re-registrations occur, and the underlying processes are often over-simplified
in scientific literature, leading to a potential bias in those studies. While
in principle registration data is available in Whois databases, scalability
issues and data ambiguities make re-registrations a challenging subject of
study in practice. By focusing on domains about to be deleted, we were able
to track 7.4 M com, net, org, biz and name domains over up to ten months to
gather data for a survival analysis of re-registrations. Our results show that
expiration processes may vary, and that many re-registrations happen soon
after deletion, especially for older domains. We also discuss intricacies of
Whois data to aid in avoiding potential pitfalls, as fast domain ownership
changes combined with hidden domain states may pose challenges to operational
and research communities.