Network Solutions Steals Domain Ideas
Posted January 12th, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings (Updated January 17th, 2008)
Network Solutions had the monoploy for domain name registrations for .com, .org and .net domains for many years before the market was opened up. They are always been much more expensive than the competition and now it turns out that they have been taking advantage of ICANN's 5 day domain refund rule to hold onto all domains that are searched on on their site, therefore preventing them from being registered through another domain name registrar.
I first read about this at DomainTools Blog and SEOMoz, and then Network Solutions confirmed that they do indeed do this, as reported by Ars Technica and The Register.
I tested this myself as follows:
1) Do a whois lookup for the domain to first confirm it's not actually registered without searching a domain name registrar. For my example I'll use "netsol-steals-domain-ideas.com". You can use an online tool such as www.domaintools.com or the Linux/Unix command line tool "whois".
2) Search for a domain name using another registar (www.GoDaddy.com ) to confirm again that it's available.
3) Go to the Network Solutions website and search on the domain. They'll tell you "Congratulations! The following domains are available" with a list of the domain you searched on and the various domain extensions available.
4) Search for the domain on the other registrar again. Oh look, now it's saying it's not available. Using a registrar like GoDaddy you can click a link to see who it's registered to. When you view the owner of the domain it will show as Network Solutions LLC. It may take a few minutes for this whois information to be available. However, even if we can't see this info yet, we know it's not actually available anymore because the other domain registrar has told us so.
5) Search Network Solutions again for the same domain. Hmm, they're telling us that it's still available. But the other registrar is telling us it's not.
So what Network Solutions is doing is to hold on to all domain names that are searched on so that they cannot be registered by other registrars and only by themselves during the 5 day grace period. I believe this is completely unethical behaviour and should be stopped by any registrars who currently do this.
Update
This is the output from querying whois once it started showing the registration information:
Registrant: This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com 13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300 HERNDON, VA 20171 US Domain Name: NETSOL-STEALS-DOMAIN-IDEAS.COM ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This Domain is Available - Register it Now! 600,000 domain names are registered daily! Don't delay; there's no guarantee that a domain name you see today will still be here tomorrow! Register it Now at www.NetworkSolutions.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Administrative Contact, Technical Contact: Network Solutions, LLC domainsupport@networksolutions.com 13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300 HERNDON, VA 20171 US 1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620 Record expires on 17-Jan-2009. Record created on 17-Jan-2008. Database last updated on 17-Jan-2008 18:22:48 EST. Domain servers in listed order: ns1.reserveddomainname.com 205.178.190.55 ns2.reserveddomainname.com 205.178.189.55
So not only are they registering all domains searched on, but they're advertising that the domain is available from themselves. This means if you look at the domain name information at another registrar when told the domain is not available, you get some advertising about Network Solutions.
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