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Network Solutions Take 2
sirkin writes "Washington Post Technews is reporting that VeriSign is resurrecting the Network Solutions name with a new subsidiary responsible for domain name registration. It seems so eerily familiar."
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Given that Verisign seems to charge 3x as much as other providers of the various services it offers, I wonder about their motivation here. Could this be an attempt to camouflage their image?
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
A pile of shit by any other name smells just as foul.
Everyone hated Network Solutions...Verisign bought 'em, and they bought the hate right along with it. Maybe they figure that the bad blood will be isolated if they spin the old name and business back off into a more seperate entity.
Actually, if you want to transfer domains to Verisign/NetSol, they play the same game as Register.com and some others, of offering you a low first-year's transfer fee, then later renewals at higher than the bulk registration market's price.
I recently switched a bunch of names from Melbourne IT to Register.com after getting a flyer in the mail offering a transfer ("plus remaining time on your old registration" for something like $15 per year, or cheaper if you get longer terms. Unfortunately, their normal quoted registrations are like $30 a year, so I wouldn't have done it otherwise. Verisign's offer was similar (no flyer needed but $19 a year for transfers), but I was a bit leery of their bad rep regarding tying up domain names that expire, yanking registrations away anytime a big business hints that it wants a domain, etc., and I remembered the spam that I got from them to my hostmaster address when a domain was registered through them.
For that matter, the agent of Melbourne IT that I went through had prices similar to Verisign's, but I had to order and renew each domain separately, which was a pain, and I figured, if another provider (in this case, Register.com) could do it cheaper and put them all in one place for me to manage, great. If they try to charge me the "regular" price next year, I'll move them all again; I'll risk a few placements with "bulk" registrars once I see that they've survived another year post-internet-burst-bubble.
One thing I do miss about having my domains at the old Network Solutions: the ability to use a crypto key to manage the domains, and doing it all through email. Of course, the downside of using email for their plaintext password alternative was that anyone could see that password, and I'm guessing that email insecurity made forging transfers easier.
Get off my launchpad!
Whether you consider yourself a Keynesian, or in the old-clasical camp of economists, I somehow tremble at some industries inability to make a profit.
The registration of domain names seems fairly staid, and yet, common-sense would dictate that little or no profit could really be meagered from such a one-point sale business. Wal-Mart on the other attempts multiple low-cost sales, with a wide variety of products. Though I'm not sure of the ROI for Verisign, I have a feeling, once all said and done, it's less than ten-percent. As a another inidicator, airlines make five to eight percent return on their money (though probably that number is worse as of late).
So the question I pose is thus: if a business or industry barely breaks even, and that industry or business is crucial to the welfare of our nation-state, shouldn't the government monopolize that business for the sake of our well-being? The answer, unfortunately, is NO. Because no matter how badly a business is run in the free-market, the government would only do worse.
So when it comes to privatization of airlines, oil, or domain names (the free flow of information is becoming more central to our security), I applaud a business trying to be more competitive, trying to evolve, trying to find a better way to manage customers, even if they stumble in doing so.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
But in a 2002 survey of Internet address buyers, VeriSign found that 87 percent of them were familiar with the name "Network Solutions" and could identify it as a domain name seller ...
...
Of course, they don't say why their name is recognizable. Long hold-times, bad support, dubious transfer-away procedures
87% of Internet address buyers are also familiar with the phrase "bunch of crappy morons".
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
If you're thinking about moving your domain somewhere else, I would recommend you start NOW. If you wait until a few weeks before the name expires, Network Solutions will screw you around untill it expires and you'll have to re-renew with Network Solutions before you can transfer it (true story).
In February of last year I purchased the domain ravin.gs. To this day VeriSign still won't help me set it up...
After a month or two of emailing back and forth with tech support, trying to get them to sort out my DNS's, I gave up in frustration when none of the host registration things you have to do for each DNS actually got processed, and when I finally got them to work (or so it seemed) the host records for my domain still never updated.
The "24 hour" replies to email support NEVER took less than 2 days, normally being around 3-4. And their final solution after constant nagging on my part was "sorry we can't help you on email, call up our tech support number and get them to fix it". Unfortunately for me, I live in Australia so I'm usually sleeping when the number is open, and I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars in phone calls just to get them to fix their own problems.
So, being the Aussie Battler I am, I gave up.
If anyone wants the domain "ravin.gs", just email me and i'll transfer it to you for free (as in beer, speech, whatever - i don't want the fucking thing). It expires next month but I don't want it. It's got the NetSol curse.
... and then there were none