In other news, water is wet.

[theweaselking]

Network Solutions: Scum.

If you use Netsol's WHOIS to see if a domain is free or not, they immediately register it and park it - so you can't get it anywhere except from them, at vastly inflated prices, and they've published it into DNS with an expiry date, meaning it is now vulnerable to cybersquatters and (other) frontrunners buying it microseconds after Netsol's extortion attempt times out.

So, if you want a domain, don't ask them if it's free. You can get it, but only from them, and only at their incredibly inflated prices.

Comments

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

It seems like you could set up a network of bots to constantly run searches and cause Network Solutions to pay to register millions of useless domains.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

NetSol doesn't pay themselves to do this.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Don't they have a central authority to pay?

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

No. They ARE the central authority all the other .com and .net registrars have to pay.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

So this corrupt little shitfest is the central domain authority, period? That smells horrible.

[skington.livejournal.com]

They're using domain tasting: you're allowed to back off from buying a domain in the first few days (4 or 5, I forget which), and you won't be charged anything. So they're not out of pocket.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

No, they aren't. NetSol don't have to pay themselves, since they hold the keys to the .com and .net TLDs. They run the registry under contract to the DoC.

[skington.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of that, but my point was that they could perfectly reasonably do this as a registrar with a popular web site, via domain tasting, without getting the registry end of things involved. That being the safer option, and one that would be less likely to have people looking at the fine print of their com/net registry contract, I assumed that's what they were doing.

[ambug666.livejournal.com]

Would it be wrong to write a script to search for random names that would never be useful? Assuming this works, I've already gotten them to register fddfdfh.com, gfjkfghj.com, fgkjfdkldfg.com, fdgldfjklfjoi.com, dsjdshhjk.com, and khhjgr.com

[mhoye.livejournal.com]

http://network-solutions-are-money-grubbing-whores.com/

[catcom.livejournal.com]

When I found out yesterday, I did my part.

netsolyousucksomuch.com

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

Well, if they have a government-backed monopoly, §35 is quire reasonable. If I had a monopoly on .com domains backed by a nuclear-armed government, I'd consider it the equivalent of a license to print money. This is how monopolies work, by divine and unchangeable law. It has been that way since the first Pharaoh and onward.

On a more technical note, their system does seem vulnerable to flooding. Since many domain squatters are foreigners, a simple pseudo-English generator should be able to overwhelm them.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

They don't have a monopoly, in theory. They're legally required to allow other people to sell .com and .net domains, and honour those sales.

However, this doesn't mean they can't abuse their status as the central registrar.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

It's only vulnerable to flooding until they put in place a script that limits taste registration to three per IP. After that, it's time for a botnet.

Whoever thought that a botnet could be used for good?