Network Solutions was the only registrar for .com domains for a few years. You wanted a .com you had to go to them. And as always happens in a monopoly, you had to pay the asking price, no questions asked.
Amazingly Network Solutions to this day still asks for 35 dollars for a year’s worth of .com goodness.

A few years ago NetSol lost their monopoly and since then other huge players like GoDaddy and Enom fight for domain name market with cheap prices.
New domain registrations at NetSol dropped to almost nil but renewals are now the main source of income at NetSol. Business was slowly dieing until suddenly NetSol starts reserving thousands of new domain names every day.

Like all registrars Network Solution’s website has a search where potential domain buyers can check if their desired domain name is available.

Some bored exec must have realized that the data from those searches could be used to increase new domain registrations. The way he found to capitalize those searches was by using a loophole in registrar policy.

All registrars are allowed to reserve a domain for five days for free, which is a safeguard created to avoid possible payment issues by users.
In simple terms if some guy registers a domain name using a credit card, and a few days later his credit card is turned down the registrar can remove the reservation with no cost whatsoever.

So Network Solutions started reserving any name searched through their site effectively locking that domain name and stopping registration at any other registrar.

If you search for the availability of mypetiscuteandfluflybutbites.com at their site it will probably show as available. If you don’t buy it at that time NetSol will automatically reserve that domain name.

If one hour later you try to register that same domain name at GoDaddy it will show as unavailable and you can’t do it. But if you go back to NetSol’s website and try again they’ll happily let you register that domain for 35 bucks.

Any lawyer will tell you that’s extortion and I believe that bored exec is now packing his stuff and writing his resume. This is not a shot in the foot it’s a shot in the head.

Do you have an insane domain name that you would like Network Solutions to have? Go ahead and search for it pretty soon that domain will be working and displaying a under construction page.

Via TechCrunch