Stealing Domain Name Ideas
Domains February 20th, 2008If you follow internet tech news at all, back on January 8th users were reporting that Network Solutions was domain tasting.
Domain tasting works like this; Using Network Solutions (Net Sol) domain search tool to see if a domain name idea is available, they were immediately putting a 4 day lock on all domain names searched on their site.
Essentially, they were hijacking and stealing domain names and forcing you to register the name at Network Solutions.
This is downright disturbing and wrong.
More than likely they did this, because users were using their search tool, then leaving their website to register the name at a competing registrar like GoDaddy.com. It only makes sense to not register your domain name at Network Solutions, since godaddy.com offers domains at 3 times less the price than Network Solutions.
I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would use Network Solutions for registering a domain name because of their corporate politics, over inflated domain prices ($30/domain), and sub-par customer service department.
Customers all over the internet were in upheaval about this unethical business practice, that a few weeks later the incident was taken care of by ICANN Board of Directors passing a resolution ending domain tasting in response to the incident.
Nice to know that was short lived. Network Solutions has added another hit to their already poor company reputation.
Other Articles and Resources:
Read the article by Jay Westerdal at domaintools.com and another article from dotsauce.com including a response in the blog comments from Network Solutions regarding the incident.

February 25th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
In your article you say this has ended. Well, this is still going on at NetworkSoluions. I just confirmed that NetworkSolutions hijacked three of my names after confirming they were available on another site (these were nonsensical names that noone would ever register in a million years), then doing a search on NS website, (which shouwed them as available), then doing the search again on the original site which saw them as available, only to find that after running the search on NS they were now unavailable on any domain name search tool other than NS. Whois showed the names as being registered to NS. This is completely unethical and reprehensible!