NetSol and Domain Front Running
I remember when Network Solutions was the only game in town for domain registration - man, that was the worst. They were expensive (although we didn’t now it at the time), their online tools for registering and maintaining your domains sucked and their customer service suuuuhuuuuuucked. Then came the big bang after which there were many domain registrars, some better than others. I bumped around a bit and ended up on bulkregister.com - which at the time had an interface only a developer could love, but since I was a developer, I loved it. Plus they were lots cheaper than NetSol was.
Since then Network Solution’s online interface has gotten better and the management tools are pretty cool, but I still don’t use them because a) they’re still expensive and b) I have a lot of stored up hatred for them for screwing me repeatedly back in the day. Now I feel vindicated. Something I always kind of worried about and only today learned that it had a name was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting“>domain front running or domain tasting. Basically, what happens is if you go to a domain registrar, lookup a domain name or ten and then don’t buy at that instant - the registrar goes and registers that name which prevents you from going somewhere else to register it.
The difference between front running and tasting is that a front runner (I believe) simply registers the name forever and a taster uses a loophole - there is 5 day grace period for domain registration so they can de-register just before the grace period ends. Both are pretty much unethical practices for a registrar to perform, if you ask me.
Turns out, pretty not surprisingly, that NetSol is doing just this. The best part is that NetSol responds to this all “we do it because we love you” style.
First comes this beauty:
You are correct that we are trying to take an arrow out of the quiver of the tasters.
As far as I understand the terminology - you aren’t taking an arrow out of the tasters’ quivers, you are a taster using the same arrows…
Then they drop this awesome bomb:
Due to no fault of registrars, Front Runners purchase search data from Internet Service Providers and/or registries and then taste those names.
There’s so many problems with this. It is not the registrars’ fault that they themselves sell domain search information to Front Runners?? Um.. whose fault is it? Second, NetSol admits that they are selling domain searches to Front Runners because, if they weren’t how would the tasters get a hold of the search information? And if the tasters aren’t getting a hold of that search information who is NetSol “protecting” their searchers from?
Bad NetSol, bad!
