Network Solutions Front Runners for Dumb Ass PR of the Year

Posted on January 29, 2008
Filed Under Making Money | | Written by Gary Reid

I was in London at the end of last week and at a meeting with some tech guys at one of the UK’s biggest registrars they mentioned that Network Solutions had started registering domains as people check availability on their site (front running). I met with Mike Butcher (Techcrunch UK) the next day and mentioned it to him and he’d heard a similar thing.

Well it does appear to be true and has been rumbling around the web for a few weeks now.

It means if you decide to register the name anywhere other than NetSol, after doing a lookup at NetSol, you won’t be able to for up to 4 days. NetSol have said

…we have started protecting all domain name searches at Network Solutions by holding the searched domains for our customers for a short period of time before releasing them. This gives our customers the opportunity to register names later without fear that the name will be registered by a â€œFront Runner.â€(Have posted some background info on â€ Front Running â€œ below).

If you hear people talk about dumb ass PR, well the above is a great example.

So, lesson one for budding entrepreneurs, avoid using crappy statements like the above, they’ll make you look like you are stupid and even worse they will make you look like you think your customers are stupid.

Now, on a good day you’d either stop there, suck up the bad press you are getting and carry on regardless, or listen to customers and stop trying to tie them into buying from you by front running their searches.

But no, that would be too easy, lets go half way and say we think only half the people who visit our site are dumb, they search on the home page for domains. The bright ones who complain use the whois lookup, so we’ll stop front running whois lookup searches but continue with the front page ones.

That’s right folks, NetSols reaction to the complaints was to just take it off whois lookups, but not from the home page.

The problem NetSol has is that it’s well known, some people still think they are the Interweb - so they go there to register a domain, only to see it’s $35, having searched and found the perfect domain they see if it’s the best deal they can get and what do you know, it’s not.