[HN Gopher] The dark patterns of Network Solutions
___________________________________________________________________
The dark patterns of Network Solutions
Author : zxlk21e
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-09-08 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coywolf.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coywolf.news)
| egberts1 wrote:
| I started with Network Solutions some 20 years ago and left about
| 10 years ago after they failed to informed me that one of my
| prized five-letter domain name had actually expired then.
|
| Yeah, never looked back since then.
| beervirus wrote:
| NS used to be one of the better, more reputable places to
| register a domain. Sad to see how far they've fallen.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| My first thought was "which PE firm acquired Network Solutions
| and caused this?" So I looked it up and indeed its parent company
| is owned by Siris Capital Group which is in their own words: "a
| private equity firm that invests in mission-critical, mature tech
| & telecom businesses at strategic crossroads." translation: Buys
| struggling businesses that have locked in clients to squeeze
| every last penny of profits out of them.
| psyklic wrote:
| I was automatically given a Network Solutions domain after
| winning a SnapNames auction. As this article correctly states,
| they require you to call a number to retrieve an auth code faster
| than the 3-day waiting period. In my case, the domain was within
| the Auto-Renew Grace Period, so I called the rep to speed it up.
|
| First, Network Solutions tried to require me to pay a "domain
| redemption fee," falsely blaming the fee on ICANN. After I told
| the rep ICANN charged no such fee, they waived it.
|
| Next, the rep refused to give me an auth code unless I signed up
| for an additional year of service. When I pointed out the exact
| ICANN regulation forbidding them to require this, the rep still
| refused to give me the auth code on the spot. (However, ICANN
| requires them to provide the auth code within a certain number of
| days, and I eventually received it.)
|
| I submitted a complaint to ICANN, but they replied that action
| would only be taken if Network Solutions flat-out refused to
| provide an auth code.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| As someone whose first Real Job was sanity checking and
| transcribing registration requests received by fax, setting up
| nameservice and then sending a properly-formatted email to have
| it installed in the root servers ... Network Solutions' behaviour
| makes my skin crawl. It didn't have to be this way.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Not sure if this is still true but in the early 2010s I
| documented several scenarios where searching for a domain on
| network solutions (but not purchasing) resulted in it getting
| automatically purchased and parked with network solutions, with a
| list price of $500.
| Mattasher wrote:
| Front-running domains was a _huge_ issue with registrars. Not
| sure sure if it still is. Registries were allowed a grace
| period to hold names without paying the ICANN fee, if they
| later released them, the idea being they might have been bought
| with a bad credit card etc so the registry would just let them
| go. No harm no foul, right?
| h2odragon wrote:
| I registered my first domain back before they charged money for
| the service. Almost as soon as they were allowed to charge, they
| began to be an exemplar of "dark patterns", before that was a
| term.
|
| I'm glad to have had nothing to do with them for 12+ years, from
| this testimony I see they've gotten even skeezier.
| classichasclass wrote:
| It took a whole mess of domains getting stolen for them to add
| even some token level of 2FA, too (mine was one of them and it
| took nearly a day to get it back; others like Perl.com weren't so
| lucky). I have only one domain left with them and I don't intend
| to renew.
| bhartzer wrote:
| I run a domain name recovery service and I can't begin to tell
| you how many domains have been stolen from network solutions.
| We are still finding out about them every day, when the domain
| owners finally realize they don't own their domain anymore.
| jmuguy wrote:
| They've been like this as long as I can remember. Whenever we
| onboarded a new customer in IT one of the first things we'd do is
| transfer their domains off Network Solutions, even Godaddy was
| never that bad.
|
| I would pressure Snapnames to partner with a less trash company.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > I would pressure Snapnames to partner with a less trash
| company.
|
| SnapNames and Network Solutions are sister companies, owned by
| web.com
| jmuguy wrote:
| Ah, web.com. That explains it.
| cfn wrote:
| I had a domain registered with Network Solutions for over 20
| years in part out of inercia and in part because their transfer
| process is so scary. I actually started the process twice over
| the last 10 years and they offered me a half price for a year
| ($15 which is still expensive) so I let it stay put both times.
|
| This year I finally decided to move out and it was a full week
| with the exact issues described in this post and it was a scary
| week! Network Solutions, never again.
| Bud wrote:
| All of this is really offensive, and doesn't match my previous
| impression of Network Solutions as a business.
|
| They have lost a lot of respect from me, based on this article. I
| won't be doing business with them ever again.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| NetworkSolutions has an interesting history of having been
| fortunate enough to be issued a monopoly by the US Government in
| the early days of the internet. This placed them firmly into the
| defense industrial complex, and for a time they were a subsidiary
| of major defense contractor SAIC/Leidos. Ultimately, though, NS
| cranked up rates so high that complaints from industry were a big
| factor in precipitating the formation of ICANN. NS reacted to the
| loss of their monopoly by going almost comically far in the
| direction of the villain, and has spent the better part of 30
| years desperately trying to entrap their customers due to their
| general failure to innovate.
|
| Of course that's a very critical take on the company, but I don't
| think I'm anywhere near alone in finding it frankly astounding
| that NetworkSolutions still exists as a major concern. The
| writing was on the wall for NetworkSolutions, as far as technical
| leadership, by the time they went public. Despite this investors
| have seen them as a milkable cow and the cash grab continues to
| the present.
| jart wrote:
| > NS cranked up rates so high that complaints from industry
| were a big factor
|
| Maybe complaints from domain squatters. I wish domains still
| cost $100/year. Before that, you had to know Jon Postel to get
| one. If everyone can buy something for 50 cents then it doesn't
| have a whole lot of prestige anymore. If a domain costs 50
| cents then all you're doing is attracting the sorts of people
| who only want to contribute 50 cents of value. What would have
| happened if that had been the government's policy during the
| western homesteading era? Expensive means the people who buy
| will be likely to use rather than squat. Expensive means you
| could get a good domain without having to buy from random guy.
| Expensive means people become more creative with the way they
| use domains. For example, I thought it was cool the way
| universities used to buy a single top-level domain, and then
| delegate sub-domain authority to departments, and they could
| delegate fourth level labels. That can't happen anymore because
| browser security policies evolved under the assumption that
| second level domains are cheap so it's no longer possible to
| have meaningful boundaries within a domain. So because of
| speculation we have a more fragile internet.
| hyakosm wrote:
| Their admin interface have popup advertising. If you want to edit
| your DNS records you have to click on << advanced DNS settings >>
| and then you are redirected _each times_ to an intermediate page
| with a popup to subscribe to some of their antimalware stuff.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| It sounds like some evil MBAs have taken over the company, and
| decided to monetize each and every customer interaction,
| including access to your inbox.
| Animats wrote:
| In 2011, Network Solutions was acquired by Web.com, from
| Verisign. Things got much worse.
| [deleted]
| Macha wrote:
| If they did, they did so like 15 years ago, Network Solutions
| have been scummy for a long time.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-08 23:01 UTC)