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The move would eliminate the five day grace period given to new registrations, which allows the organisation or person time to back out of a registration if they've made a mistake.

ICANN claims that removing the grace period could put an end to the practice of registering thousands of domain names simultaneously

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to test their profitability, then dropping the unprofitable ones without having to pay for their use.

The organisation highlighted the problem by referring to a study it conducted in January 2007, in which ten companies accounted for 95% of all deleted domain names.

"Domain tasting has been an issue for the internet community and ICANN is offering this proposal as a way to stop tasting," says Paul Twomey, ICANN's president.

"Charging the ICANN fee as soon as a domain name is registered would close the loophole used by tasters to test a domain name's profitability for free."

Google has also responded to this problem recently, announcing that sites less than five-days-old will not be able to generate revenue through AdSense.