Around 1999 I was in the tiny office of what is now a major UK domain registration company. The domain searches from the website flashed up. Interesting ones were registered.

Ahem, <legals>Of course I'm sure they must have been to protect the customer's interest</legals>.

BTW it was a little company then. When a domain was purchased the CC number went on a paper slip through an old CC sliding thingy ... Cutting edge is what happened if you put your fingers in the wrong place.

is the number of domains that are not actually in use, but are placeholders for cybersquatting.

Its time there was a an automatic forfeit of any domain name whose primary function appears to be providing gateway pages to spam search engines, and for any company that owns the registration more than 10 domains to forfeit any of those domains if the domain fails to provide significant and unique content after 3 months.

So they are only saying side effects of domain name tasting and other secondary market activities are not front-running. The act of locking a domain is going to continue, trying to extort money greater than the costs involved is not happening much anyway.

Also what do they mean by the 333 people who try to register a domain, it sounds more like 333 searches which say "this domain is/is not registered" not a very large number of attempts are being made to register domains.

For instance fucknetworksolutions.com, net, org, info, us, biz, ws & gs are taken already, but I don't want to register them. Would this search result in every TLD being checked and counted as an attempt to register ?

... that some miscreant might do domain lookups on NetSol's website for as many dictionary combinations as they can fit in before their IP gets blocked.

It would never do if nobody was able to register any .coms anywhere because NetSol had pre-emptively protected all those domains from being tasted by anyone else, would it ?

That sort of thing might be counted as a DoS and I think it would be a very bad idea ...