Comments on: Network Solutions holding domains to ransom

By: Tai Slim

Tai Slim — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:19:54 +0000

International community such as WWW Org and ICANN should do something to control such registration scams. Such thing make internet ugly. Network Solution’s wrong practice must be abandoned.

Recently I got an email from a chinese registrar the some company has applied for a simillar domain name which resembles my business. They enlisted several simillar domains which I should register. I suppose this is also a scam to register more domains.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:50:28 +0000

Very informative article, thanks

By: jon

jon — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:34:38 +0000

wow! great article. thanks for sharing.

By: Network Solutions (NetSol) ransom at Ambrand Dot Com

Network Solutions (NetSol) ransom at Ambrand Dot Com — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:12:50 +0000

[...] to http://www.networksolutions.com and check if a random domain is available (I tried f5ke00gpl.com and it was). Sit back for 5 minutes. Then do a WHOIS using your [...]

By: Malcolm Smith

Malcolm Smith — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:00:13 +0000

Yes, I saw the /. article, and particularly enjoyed this comment:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=410854&cid=21958492

(Interestingly, and perhaps as a reaction to the above post(s), they’ve changed their domain-squatting page that used to feature a smug blond-haired blue-eyed guy to a simple “website under construction page”.)

I tried it myself, and then at this month’s HertsLUG meeting gave a demonstration with a randomly-picked domain shouted from the floor:

http://www.networksolutionsstealthis.com

This was originally freely available (although someone had beaten us to the .co.uk and .de variants ;-) But after about a minute, they’d sat on it.

Their CEO (who apparently likes goatse) gave a response claiming that they were protecting their customers. Yeah right, without telling anyone.

I doubt there is much that can be done. It doesn’t cost them anything, so they will keep doing it. Hopefully their company’s reputation is now worth 0.02c.

I think we need a separate interweb for such lamers.

By: bigpresh

bigpresh — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:25:29 +0000

@Sam:

Of course – but that’s 4 days too long, and, as you commented on the other post, when the domain drops there’s a good chance that the bottom-feeders of the domain market will immediately snap it up, so if the original user who searched for it waits for NS to drop it, they’ll probably not be able to register it anyway.

ICANN recently appealed for reports of domain front-running, so I sent them a report of NS’s behaviour last night – I doubt they’ll have the cojones to do anything, but still.

By: Sam Kington

Sam Kington — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:58:42 +0000

They’ll only own these domains for 4 days, though.

By: bigpresh

bigpresh — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:55:14 +0000

Oh, and if ICANN aren’t annoyed enough by these tactics, I’m sure they won’t like the fact that Network Solutions are the proud owners of icann-can-lick-our-butthole.com!

By: bigpresh

bigpresh — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:50:33 +0000

And the folks at Slashdot have got them to register lots of controversial domains, including network-solutions-supports-terrorism.com, osama-bin-laden-is-hiding-at-network-solutions.com, george-bush-should-be-assasinated.com (nice spelling though), and even stuff that might get them in trouble for registering domains containing trademarks like authenticdisneymerchandise.com. I'd love to know how many domains they've snapped up since everyone reading the Slashdot article about this got involved. It does seem as though they've stopped snaffling domains I've searched for though... either they'll only do so many per IP, or they've disabled it now.

By: bigpresh

bigpresh — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:18:46 +0000

They do it not only for domains checked via their website, but also for ones checked on their whois server.

I verified with:

whois -h whois.networksolutions.com stop-stealing-domain-names-you-bastards.com

Sure enough, a few minutes later, they’d registered it.