New data released this month by ICANN shows a 99.7% drop in domain tasting since it changed the fees back in April 2009.

Domain tasting is the practice of registering a domain name for a few days, seeing if it can make any money through advertising, then deleting it for a full refund.

ICANN changed it’s rules so that the ICANN refund didn’t apply, and most registries changed their terms so that registrars could only return about 10% of their monthly registrations.

To give an idea of the scale of this practice, in June 2008, nearly 17.7 Million gTLD domains were tasted. Now in June 2009  just 58,000 were returned (probably due to errors in registrations)

The net result – should mean more domains are available for the general public to buy.