Conquer the Web

We Test, Synthesize and Share the Latest Internet Marketing Tactics and Strategies to Help You Better Run Your Online Business

Network Solutions Follow Up: Even Dumber and More Evil Than Before!

January 22nd, 2008 by Vishen Lakhiani Read more about Articles, Reviews

A few days ago we wrote a post on how Net­work Solu­tions screwed us out of a domain and we rec­om­mended that peo­ple avoid Net­work Solu­tions at all cost.

The post made it to the front page of Red­dit and got ref­er­enced on a num­ber of blogs. Superb!

But here’s an inter­est­ing lit­tle development.

Most of the com­ments on my post were positive.

But one post stood out, from a guy called Jeff. He said:

Just wait 5 days, and then buy domain name from GoDaddy. Bit of a has­sle. but no big­gie. On the other hand, if you are going to use your new blog like this one (repost other peo­ples info in a way that’s more bor­ing then how they did it. Or, tak­ing a red­dit thread, cre­at­ing a bs post arround it, sub­mit­ting it to red­dit, and etc.) please don’t bother with it.

For the record, Jeff jeff, this was an orig­i­nal post, not a copy, nor did we use any threads from Red­dit. We quoted a press release… So I was puz­zled by this comment.

Fur­ther­more, Jeff acci­dently left his email address (required when you com­ment on a post) as XXXXXX@NetworkSolutions.com.

Was he jok­ing or did he really work for Net­work Solu­tions? I mused for 3 lib­er­at­ing seconds.

Dig­ging deeper, I traced his IP address to come from Reston, VA, which accord­ing to Google Maps is just 6 short and evil min­utes from Hern­don, VA -

… the loca­tion of the Net­work Solu­tions Main Office!

Hmmmm. Some­how I sus­pect Jeff might be work­ing for Net­work Solutions.

Well Jeff, whether you work for Net­work Solu­tions or not, let me reply as to why what they’re doing is wrong.

Trap­ping Inter­net Users into Pay­ing Inflated Prices for Net­work Solu­tions’ Ser­vice by Hold­ing Their Domains Hostage Is Atrocious

Net­work Solu­tions Has the #1 and #2 Spot on Google for “Who Is” and “WhoIs” respec­tively. Most users seek­ing to check a domain’s avail­abil­ity will end up on your site.

NOWHERE on the site does Net­work Solu­tions men­tion that they’re going to LOCK the domain for 5 days if you do not buy from them immediately.

You accused me of fak­ing my post Jeff. But what I expe­ri­enced was real.

And you claimed this pol­icy by Net­work Solu­tions was no big deal and that I could buy my domain 5 days later from GoDaddy.

Well, actu­ally it was a big deal.

My blog edi­tor and I were shat­tered when we went on GoDaddy to pur­chase the domain (which your WHOIS had claimed was avail­able) only to find it “had been snatched up.” We never knew that we could claim it in 5 days. How on earth are most inter­net users sup­posed to know that?

We knew some­one had watched our search. And we passed on that domain as lost. We went with another domain for our blog.

This, I sus­pect, hap­pens to most users. Your company’s pol­icy causes inno­cent peo­ple to either think their domains are lost and give up — OR pay you ridicu­lously inflated prices for these domains.

What’s worse — is that you adopted this pol­icy AFTER thou­sands of web­sites linked to your Who Is ser­vice and pushed it to the top of Google.

Now THAT is a betrayal of pub­lic trust.

So my opin­ion stands. Net­work Solu­tions should be avoided AT ALL COSTS.

please stop your evil

Last 5 posts by

About the Author

Vishen Lakhiani Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley. Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.

Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.

35 comments, add yours! »

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

35 Responses to “Network Solutions Follow Up: Even Dumber and More Evil Than Before!”

  1. January 22nd, 2008 at 5:48 am Kiley

    They just keep dig­ging the hole deeper.

  2. January 22nd, 2008 at 6:37 am Al

    These peo­ple at NSI did what I always thought some­one evil could do. Search for domain names on NSI and you will have to reg­is­ter with them, or find another name. They have done the same to me with a cou­ple of domains. Unfor­tu­nately, one is actu­ally reg­is­tered with them because we needed it badly. Net­work Solu­tions has been there for a long time but they have now betrayed me and I can see that many other peo­ple too. I will never again use them for any­thing. Not even vis­it­ing their site. They´re not worth it. I hope it slaps them back.

  3. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:01 am Ryan

    Why don’t you just email Jeff to con­firm whether he works for Net­work Solu­tions, and whether he’s speak­ing offi­cially on behalf of the com­pany? You have his email address.

  4. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:19 am Daniel

    My boss used Net­work Solu­tions disin­gen­u­ous whois tool to check the avail­abil­ity of two domain names that we planned to reg­is­ter with godaddy, and sure enough, they auto­mat­i­cally reg­is­tered them with the 5-day reg­is­trar lock. I called tech sup­port and asked them to release the locks. The CSR was polite, and defended the pol­icy as a con­ve­nience to the user, but I did men­tion the huge amount of neg­a­tive press they were get­ting as seen on Google news. The CSR claimed that Net­work Solu­tions had checked with ICANN and received the green light to go ahead with the pol­icy of lock­ing searched domain names.

    Any­way, I got him to remove the two locks, and he gave me a ticket num­ber and said they’d be released in up to 2 days. They were avail­able in 15 min­utes, and we were quickly able to reg­is­ter them on Godaddy.

    Any­way, if it hap­pens to any­way, it doesn’t hurt to call them and ask them to remove the locks imme­di­ately. Enough of those calls and lost busi­ness and they’ll get the mes­sage … maybe. Not that I want them to. I’d like to see all uneth­i­cal busi­ness go out of business.

  5. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:22 am Shawn

    To: Jeff

    This uneth­i­cal prac­tice that your com­pany is engaged in has made me:
    1) never search for a domain name using Net­work Solu­tions.
    2) never, I repeat, never reg­is­ter a name with your company.

    Recently, I used Net­work Solu­tions to search for a domain name using a key­word of GPS. After enter­ing name after name, gpsgrapevine.com showed up avail­able. Although not my first choice, a TLD of .com was some­what exciting.

    I close my browser to check my Pay­pal account before I pur­chase the domain name. Within 2 min­utes, I go to GoDaddy.com to pur­chase the domain, and BAM! it’s taken. To say I was pissed is an understatement.

    So, imme­di­ately I do a Whois search, and low and behold the owner is Net­work Solu­tions! Upon call­ing them, I get a rehearsed response of, ” We hold it for four days to pro­tect you from from los­ing it.” WTF!

    How­ever, the guy on the phone said that it was avail­able if I wanted to pay the $34.99 fee. So much for “protection”!

    BASTARDS!

  6. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:27 am j0k3r

    Hmm.. I thought Net­Sol is cute..

  7. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:38 am joe

    Look, just get over it already, not only did NSI make a pub­lic announce­ment about this, its also been ALL OVER DIGG and REDDIT, which appar­ently you know how to use… Just stop cry­ing, because you had to go out of your way in order reg­is­ter your domain… if you’re going to buy it at godaddy you still have to check avail­abil­ity any­way… so why did you use NSI’s web­site??? Why did you make an extra step for your­self???? Suck it up and buy it at NSI, are you that cheap that you can’t afford 35 bucks???? loser

  8. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:57 am Deliggit.com | The social sites' most interesting urls

    Net­work Solu­tions Fol­low Up: Even Dumber and More Evil Than Before! | Deliggit.com…

    blog.mindvalleylabs.com

    More on the Net­work Solu­tions domain tast­ing saga.

    Just wait 5 days, a…

  9. January 22nd, 2008 at 8:25 am Peter

    Bit dra­matic, dont-ya-think?

  10. January 22nd, 2008 at 8:32 am Will not be published

    I am a long-time reader and fre­quent com­menter. Now that I know you have no prob­lem sin­gling peo­ple out by pub­lish­ing the com­pany they work for if they hap­pen to post neg­a­tively about you, I will no longer be read­ing or com­ment­ing here.

  11. January 22nd, 2008 at 9:32 am Plepco

    Awe­some job of call­ing them on their scam, and then call­ing them on their BS com­ment on your red­dit post. Bunch of morons. And for the record, I have avoided Net­Sol for years. Not only do they charge too much, and not only do I hate the way they do busi­ness, they have no ethics. Evi­dence speaks for itself.

  12. January 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 am Mythprogrammer

    I sec­ond the boy­cott of net­work solu­tions. They’re keep­ing my dad on their site, hold­ing it and not allow­ing him to trans­fer to godaddy.

  13. January 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 am Dave

    Well said, good job on the IP track­ing there Vishen, I can’t believe they’d come try­ing to bash peo­ple for their criticism.

    To Net­work Solu­tions:
    THE PUBLIC OBVIOUSLY DO NOT WANT YOUR NEW FORERUNNING “SERVICE”. It would be very wise if you were to remove it ASAP.

    A pub­lic apol­ogy wouldn’t go amiss either.

    Nice one Vishen!

  14. January 22nd, 2008 at 9:51 am Benajnim

    This orga­ni­za­tion obvi­ously doesn’t have a clue.
    I think they’re opened them­selves up for trade­mark infringe­ment law­suites, I’m nearly hold­ing my breath wait­ing for the head­line on a class action.

  15. January 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 am bob

    I find it odd peo­ple use Net­sol to find domains then use GoDaddy to reg­is­ter them. Appar­ently GoDaddy’s domain search tool sucks because nobody wants to use a captcha on every search.

    I think GoDaddy’s piss-poor search func­tion forced peo­ple to go else­where to find domains, which is just very poor service.

    GoDaddy needs to end this prob­lem by fix­ing their domain search and remov­ing the captcha. Then maybe a lot of peo­ple wouldn’t have resorted to Net­Sol and lost domains.

  16. January 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 am angel

    I really like the fact that their reg­is­tra­tions fees are so competitive!

    Thanks for the info! Yet another rea­son to avoid Net­work Solutions!

  17. January 22nd, 2008 at 12:31 pm 300baud

    No offense intended, but I gotta say… Well DUH! They are the *orig­i­nal* slimy Inter­net oper­a­tion. Before Pay­Pay, before X10.com, before phish­ers, scam­mers, spam­mers and adware, there was InterNIC.

  18. January 22nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm fake jeff

    This hap­pened to us as well. We too had no idea about wait­ing for 5 days. I wish the gov­er­ment was com­pe­tent in these (or any) man­ners. Net­work Solu­tions should have their right to reg­is­ter pulled. Any­one know a lawyer will­ing to take up the cause?

    And for GoDaddy — they have thier own hor­ror sto­ries of just cut­ting off a site tht some­one com­plains about. I would stay clear of them as well.

  19. January 22nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm Colin

    I’ve seen com­pa­nies like Net­work Solu­tions ( ques­tion­able busi­ness ethics ) respond in this man­ner sev­eral times over the years. Invari­ably, the blog owner (usu­ally me) is smarter than they are. The most recent one I saw was ameriprise finan­cial. It really makes a com­pany look bad doing things like this.

    http://topstartup.com/2007/11/09/how-should-companies-respond-to-criticism/

  20. January 22nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm Hey

    Use nameboy.com they are great for search­ing domain names– they also give a real­is­tic list of alter­nate names.

  21. January 22nd, 2008 at 4:58 pm Hmmm

    A thought just occurs to me. Any­one with zom­bies could do a Dynamic Denial of Domain Reg­is­tra­tion (DDoR) attack. That would pretty quickly make ICANN change their minds on the pol­icy if nobody was ever able to reg­is­ter a domain as Net­work Solu­tions was hold­ing all of them for 5 days a piece.

  22. January 22nd, 2008 at 7:48 pm Devin

    I read­about before get­ting my domain a cou­ple of years ago.
    I searched through dreamhost.com and reg­is­tered it as well.
    Saved me a bunch of prob­lems.
    Search and cheap host all in one easy to use place.

  23. January 22nd, 2008 at 8:59 pm mike

    I agree — never use them. Or GoDaddy for that mat­ter…
    I started using NameCheap a while ago & have been really happy with them.
    Mike

  24. January 23rd, 2008 at 2:24 am BillinDetroit

    I got ‘stuck’ by Net­Sol exactly once and my rela­tion­ship with GoDaddy wasn’t exactly all smooth sail­ing, either.

    Now I use another ISP (for less money, to boot) and things go smoothly.

    Les­son learned.

  25. January 23rd, 2008 at 4:10 am Pete Dooley

    Get ICANN in on this. They are really insu­lated but I dug deep and found some e-mails. They are hid­ing under a rock but they are sup­posed to be a gov­ern­ing body here. I have spent a year try­ing to just get a clients infor­ma­tion to just switch their DNS! NWS refuses. The only time I got a response was when I con­tacted ICANN. Did it work? I received no response from ICANN but some­how a nazi from NWS did call me. Still refuses to allow access after numer­ous faxes of dri­vers licenses, water bills, even their NWS bill. This com­pany needs to be stopped!

  26. January 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 pm Shaun

    I never knew that they did that. I work for a major web­host­ing com­pany. I kept com­ing across this when peo­ple tried to reg­is­ter their domains with us. I would then do a whois on the domain they are try­ing to pur­chase and low an behold it is net­work solu­tions. Talk about all the pissed off cus­tomers we get about this. I will for surely never do a whois on net­work solu­tions or even try to reg­is­ter a domain name with them as they are dieing out lots of peo­ple are leav­ing them and I would never reg­is­ter a domain name with them as if you reg­is­ter a domain with net­work solu­tions the only site you can do a whois on for that is net­work solu­tion. Granted I can do a whois in com­mand prompt but still I should not have to do that.

  27. January 24th, 2008 at 2:30 pm jeff

    You can call the prices “over-inflated,” but what it really boils down to is that you didn’t want the domain name enough to pay for it. Buyer’s remorse hap­pens, I under­stand, but most of us can man­age to get by with­out whin­ing to the entire world about it.

    Suck it up.

  28. January 27th, 2008 at 2:54 pm Tor

    Hi,

    I have reg­istr­ered a domain at Net­work Solu­tions. How do I change to other com­pany? Is it possible?

    brg Tor Hansen

  29. January 28th, 2008 at 2:03 pm Anon

    Your being trolled would be humor­ous if you weren’t such a drama whore.

  30. January 29th, 2008 at 4:03 am Dave

    I say you post his email address so peo­ple can send him a few emails.

    I’d cer­tainly like to complain.

  31. January 29th, 2008 at 2:14 pm bryan

    @jeff,

    Why would I pay your stu­pid $34.99 / yr for a domain name, when I can just get it (cheap­est, yet) at godaddy for $9.99. No thank you. I think it’s time we go com­plain to ICANN and get your reg­is­ter­ing ser­vice disabled!

  32. February 12th, 2008 at 10:39 am gary

    RIDICULOUS. I called them up, “wait 4 days or reg­is­ter it through us.” To the peo­ple who keep say­ing “suck it up, just pay the $35″ — it’s not about not hav­ing the money, it’s about a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple. You pay these idiots, and it only jus­ti­fies their posi­tion more.

  33. February 16th, 2008 at 12:48 am Jeff

    I’m a dif­fer­ent Jeff, I swear! I was trapped by Net­Sol as well. A truly despi­ca­ble prac­tice. Keep the bad press flow­ing, they need to be put out of busi­ness before more unwit­ting souls get screwed!

  34. March 13th, 2008 at 7:58 pm Robynn

    Oh man I wish I had seen this BEFORE I went to Net­work Solu­tions to check the name avail­abil­ity. For the dorks who are ask­ing WHY you would go to Net­work Solu­tions to do a name look up, it’s sim­ply habit. Peo­ple who have been doing work on the web since the early 90s have just been using inter­nic for that long — NEVER before now, has nasty stuff like this hap­pened to me and I’ve reg­is­tered at least a hun­dred domains. All the domains I wanted were avail­able — until an hour after I looked for me. I got the heads up from my web host­ing chick (who is a real per­son NOT a com­pany like Go Daddy that actu­ally gives you zero con­trol over your site or SQL data­bases) that this was a new prob­lem with Net­work Solu­tions, and I should just wait seven days and hold my breath. At first, Net­work Solu­tions said I could reg­is­ter those domains for $9 each. I was get­ting 10 domains, but I was going to suck and up and pay it. By the time they were in my cart, they were $40 each. For the per­son who says to suck it up and pay the inflated price, do the math — that’s $400 dollars.

    I was too busy to call Net­work Solu­tions at this point, but con­sid­er­ing some of the “alter­na­tive” domains that were listed at the bot­tom of my search were top­ping out at $1000 dol­lars a piece, I have a sink­ing feel­ing I’m screwed. I’ve heard there’s a class action law­suit in the works to com­bat this kind of dis­gust­ing behav­ior (which is basi­cally copy­right infringe­ment, because that domain name was my idea and their process stole my idea and are ask­ing ME to pay to actu­ally use it) and I’m def­i­nitely going to look into it.

  35. June 7th, 2008 at 5:15 pm Network Solutions Follow Up: Even Dumber and... [ MindValleyLabs ]

    […] Jan­u­ary 22nd 2008 10:38am [-] From: blog.mindvalleylabs.com Related? […]

Leave a Reply

Previous post: Extremely Large and Awesome Changes to MindValley Labs Coming Very Soon…
Next post: Want to Annoy Your Visitors, Turn Away Customers and Screw Up Your Google Rankings? Great, just add a Flash Intro to Your Site