When Alicia Navarro began casting about for a memorable name for her new company, she confronted a brutal reality. All her brilliant ideas for an Web domain name were taken.

“I came up with so many gems, only to be devastated to find that the domain name was not available,” Navarro, a former executive at Vodafone, said. “It means that Net entrepreneurs are having to come up with ridiculous words to name their businesses — Twango, Yugma, Stikkit, Rootly.”

Add Skimbit, the invented name of her London Web-applications company, to that list. Her Web woes — like those of many others — are tied to the sharp acceleration of speculation in World Wide Web names, a practice known as “domain tasting” in which names are registered by the millions and tested for their advertising prospects without charge during a five-day grace period.

Arbitrators like the World Intellectual Property Organization and the National Arbitration Forum attribute the record number

of universal trademark disputes last year to domain tasting. Since that anatomy of domain name tasting emerged in 2005, for example, the number of disputes to come before the WIPO has risen 48 percent, to 2,156.

For companies like Microsoft, domain tasting composes the constant headache of chasing after typo-squatters — those who create and register Web sites with misspelled variations of the Microsoft name. For individual users, it means that millions of names are tied up in a constant churn of registering and returning names before fees are charged.

Now ICANN — the World Wide Web Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization based in California that manages domain names — is considering steps to stamp out the practice.

The board of ICANN will vote in Paris in June on a proposal to severely limit the number of domain names that can be returned without a fee, but the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News