http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=410854&cid=21958492

(Interestingly, and perhaps as a reaction to the above post(s), they’ve changed their domain-squatting page that used to feature a smug blond-haired blue-eyed guy to a simple “website under construction page”.)

I tried it myself, and then at this month’s HertsLUG meeting gave a demonstration with a randomly-picked domain shouted from the floor:

http://www.networksolutionsstealthis.com

This was originally freely available (although someone had beaten us to the .co.uk and .de variants But after about a minute, they’d sat on it.

Their CEO (who apparently likes goatse) gave a response claiming that they were protecting their customers. Yeah right, without telling anyone.

I doubt there is much that can be done. It doesn’t cost them anything, so they will keep doing it. Hopefully their company’s reputation is now worth 0.02c.

I think we need a separate interweb for such lamers.

Of course - but that’s 4 days too long, and, as you commented on the other post, when the domain drops there’s a good chance that the bottom-feeders of the domain market will immediately snap it up, so if the original user who searched for it waits for NS to drop it, they’ll probably not be able to register it anyway.

ICANN recently appealed for reports of domain front-running, so I sent them a report of NS’s behaviour last night - I doubt they’ll have the cojones to do anything, but still.

I’d love to know how many domains they’ve snapped up since everyone reading the Slashdot article about this got involved.

It does seem as though they’ve stopped snaffling domains I’ve searched for though… either they’ll only do so many per IP, or they’ve disabled it now.

I verified with:


whois -h whois.networksolutions.com stop-stealing-domain-names-you-bastards.com


Sure enough, a few minutes later, they’d registered it.