Google has the motto ‘Do No Evil’ when it comes to corporate practices. Only time will tell if they can stick to this policy as they continue to grow into the future. One company that has definitely crossed the line, in my opinion, is website company Network Solutions.
If you use Network Solutions to check if a domain is available they immediately go ahead and register it for themselves. They keep it registered for 5 days and during that period if you visit the proposed domain you will see their page offering to sell it to you for $39.95. They claim this is a ’service’ for their customers as it reserves if for them to buy and prevents squatters getting it during those five days.
Obviously this explanation if nonsense. During that 5 days it can be bought by anyone that contacts Networks Solutions and not just the person who made the search. Hence it might not help the searcher at all. Plus during those 5 days you are forced to buy it via Network Solutions at a cost of $39.95 which is much more expensive than other registrars. If you really wanted the domain you would probably go ahead and buy it from them in order to prevent the risk of it being acquired by someone else once the 5 days is up.
UPDATE: Here are news links
DomainNews Story
Wikipedia & Issue
Digg Story
Reddit Comments
January 10th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
That is shocking behaviour from Network Solutions if it is true. And I suspect it’s also illegal, as it’s anti competitive.
As for Google, for me, they abandoned “Do no evil” in favour of “See no evil” and “Hear no evil” when they agreed to participate in the opression of the Chinese population by agreeing to censor the internet.
As an example, do a search for tiananmen square on Google.com, note the articles with words like bloodshed, protests etc. Then try the same search on google.cn, note the tourist websites offereing virtual tours.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Network Solutions Scam…
I’ve just read a rather disturbing post on the component factory blog about Network Solutions and a potential scam they might be pulling.It would seem that when you search for a domain, they are automatically registering that domain, and charging…
January 10th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
No matter what they’re saying, they are now in the business of “domain squatting” as well.
People with time at their hands could annoy them by doing bulk bogus searches, with Network Solutions paying money each time you do a search for sdihfgkwehykdjf.com or whatever. Anyone care to write a script for that? :D
January 11th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Well NetSol does it from very first day they started, so nothing new here. And this is why people prefer services like GoDaddy… Let’s not make another buzz bubble from nothing…
January 11th, 2008 at 5:08 am
The bastards
January 11th, 2008 at 5:19 am
It’s 34.99 for 1 year.
…You could atleast get the pricing right.
January 13th, 2008 at 4:38 am
Yeah NS are a bunch of %$!@*&$#@
they should be shut down….
like the thing they had going ( do they still do this?) they would make domains that were not even rgistered point to a page they put up.
this was making problems for anti-spam software casue it made un-registered domains appear to be valid in dns.
that and many other things they do are “grey” areas at best.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:35 am
[...] Solutions has run afoul of bloggers, domain registry industry watchers and others in the last few days when it became clear that using [...]
February 11th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
network solutions is such a lame ass scam.