This seems like it’s taken Forever to be fully put in place and take effect, but today is ICANN’s deadline for registrars to put the policy into full effect.

What does this mean for you? In the past, if you made a typo when registering a domain name, you could have the registrar delete the domain during the Add Grace Period (AGP) and you would get a full refund or near full refund from the registrar.

Entities took full advantage of this policy and were "tasting" domain names for the 96 hours they could for traffic. If the domain produced for them, they would keep it. If the domain didn’t produce, they would "redrop" the domain. This was done for millions of domain names monthly.

It will be interesting to see what people come up with now to dodge the new policy as domain tasting is big business.

All in all, this "should" help the little guy to be able to register better domain names during the PendingDelete drop process daily. Will it allow you to grab LLL.com’s? No, but is should allow for better domains then you could hand reg before during the drop.

The following is from ICANN.org:

Add Grace Period (AGP)

A grace period refers to a specified number of calendar days following a gTLD registry operation in which the operation may be reversed and a credit may be issued to a Registrar. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is typically the five-day period following the initial registration of a domain name. AGP appears as a contractual term in some, but not all gTLD registry agreements.

Currently, when a domain name is registered through a Registrar, that Registrar may delete the domain name at any time during the first five calendar days of the registration (the Add Grace Period or AGP), and receive a full credit for the registration fee from the Operator. Once a domain name is deleted by the registry at this stage, it is immediately available for registration by any registrant through any Registrar.

AGP was intended to allow for the no-cost cancellation of domain name registrations resulting from typos and other errors by Registrars and registrants as well as some types of fraudulent registrations.

Effect on Operators

For an Operator providing an AGP in its Registry Agreement (some Operators have AGP defined in the functional and performance specifications appendix of their agreement) this new Policy will impact and limit the application of this functionality. Prior to implementing this new Policy, all Operators must give all active Registrars 30-days notice of the change in AGP refund limits. That notification should take place within 21 days of the official public announcement of the new Policy and Operators should subsequently implement the Policy as soon as possible but no later than 31 March 2009. Upon implementation of the Policy, Operators may no longer provide refunds to Registrars for AGP deletes that exceed the threshold limits set by the Policy unless an exemption has been granted by an Operator.

The Operator will be responsible for payment of registry-level fees to ICANN for any transactions that do not result in a refund of the registration fee. Operators should process and resolve all exemption requests on or before the last day of the month following the month the request was submitted, and only in rare cases should the exemption review and resolution time exceed 30 days.

The Policy defines net new registrations as the total number of net adds of one-year through ten-year registrations as defined in the monthly reporting requirement of Operator Agreements (i.e., a new registration for one year and a new registration for 10 years are each counted as one new registration).