In June 2008, the ICANN Board approved the FY09 Budget that contained a provision on AGP deletes. The provision is that domain names deleted during the AGP will be included as transactions if they exceed the maximum of (i) 10% of that registrar's net new registrations in that month, or (ii) fifty (50) domain names, whichever is greater. Therefore the per-transaction fee, currently US$0.20, will be assessed on all AGP deletes that exceed the defined threshold.

This provision was adopted as a short-term solution to address excessive AGP delete activity until the consensus policy on domain tasting, now referred to as the AGP Limits Policy, is implemented. The Policy and draft implementation plan were posted for public comment on 20 October 2008 (see, http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-20oct08-en.htm) and are expected to be announced for implementation in early December.

Following implementation of the Board approved budget provision that affects the "domain tasting fee," names added and subsequently deleted during the five-day AGP declined from approximately 17.6M in June 2008 to 2.8M in July 2008. Of the 2.8M AGP deletes in July, approximately 2.6M were subject to the registrar-level transaction fee defined by the provision. Therefore, it is expected that the quantity of AGP deletes will continue to decline until few or none are subject to the transaction fee.

ICANN will continue to provide updates to the community on AGP delete activity following the three-month confidentiality period for gTLD monthly reports. These reports may be viewed at http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/monthly-reports/.