Keep Your Desired New Domain Name a Secret!

The domain names industry, if I may call it that, has been revolutionized a couple of years ago when real competition was allowed and besides Network Solutions, the monopolistic figure at that time, many other lower-priced competitors entered the market. Today, the once proud and all too costly Network Solutions is a distant third when it comes to size.

They have come up with a questionable way to try and claw their way back to the top, and I'm sure that you'll agree with the adjective I used to describe it: if a user searches on the site for a domain name, the company immediately registers that domain under its own name, so if the user then goes to a different registrar to buy it, it shows as unavailable, leaving him with two options, either give it up or buy it from Network Solutions and pay 35 bucks per year for it. Just for comparison, the other big names like GoDaddy and eNorm charge users as little as 8 dollars for the same thing.

This scheme that they came up with has been going on since Tuesday and, so far, they have already registered 72,000 domain names using it, all temporarily assigned a name server of "reserveddomainname". Ingenious on their part, as they don't have to pay anything for these names, registrars are allowed to register domains for up to five days without paying any fees to the domain name registry (which happens to be Verisign in this case). After the five days are gone by and if a client hasn't shown up willing to buy, they simply delete the domains and don't pay a dime.

The period mentioned is specially designed to let registrars off the hook for credit card fraud a big problem in the domain name industry, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com pointed out.