Abstract.
When desirable Internet domain names expire, they are often reregistered in
the very moment the old registration is deleted, in a highly competitive and
resource-intensive practice called domain drop-catching. To date, there has
been little insight into the daily time period when expired domain names are
deleted, and the race to re-registration that takes place. In this paper, we
show that .com domains are deleted in a predictable order, and propose a model
to infer the earliest possible time a domain could have been reregistered. We
leverage this model to characterise at a precision of seconds how fast certain
types of domain names are re-registered. We show that 9.5 % of deleted
domains are re-registered with a delay of zero seconds. Domains not taken
immediately by the drop-catch services are often re-registered later, with
different behaviours over the following seconds, minutes and hours. Since
these behaviours imply different effort and price points, our methodology can
be useful for future work to explain the uses of re-registered domains