Network Solutions continues to be committed to providing superior products and customer service (cough cough)

October 16, 2003 10:06 AM

VeriSign to Sell Network Solutions The Registry business that is the backbone of the global .com and .net domain name infrastructure currently handles over 10 billion interactions per day, remains with VeriSign as a critical component of its business. The customer-facing Registrar business is the world's leading provider of domain name registrations, and an industry leader in value added services such as business email, websites, hosting and other web presence services. The Registrar, which re-assumed the Network Solutions name in January of this year, constitutes the current Network Solutions business that is being sold. [emphasis added]
posted by quonsar (14 comments total)

When you consider the value add they implemented there will be a handsome profit I'm sure. /snark
posted by nofundy at 10:17 AM on October 16, 2003

verislime also promised that they will be resuming the sitefinder "service", although this time they will give 30 to 60 days notice beforehand. 'cos their, uh, independent investigation found nothing wrong with it don'cha know.
posted by dorian at 10:18 AM on October 16, 2003

Does this mean the most definitive whois search will no longer be at netsol.com? Or has it been elsewhere already? Often when I start at register.com or another registrar I wind up going to netsol.com to confirm, either because data is missing or it refers me there anyway. Anyone have info / link?
posted by soyjoy at 10:22 AM on October 16, 2003

Pivotal Private Equity is a sector of Pivotal Group, Inc. (that site does not inspire confidence, but at least they eat their own dog food), which is mostly a real-estate investment firm. Why is this happening?

soyjoy: I use (see the link above) betterwhois.com.
posted by gleuschk at 10:31 AM on October 16, 2003

I thought that the definitive whois for a domain, was the registrar of that domain?

that so many end up directing to NSI is simply because a major balance of domains are still registered through them (poor saps).

I'm happy enough with the geektools whois, especially now that NSI finally allows you to access their data remotely again. some web-based whois used to (and maybe still do) return a link to netsol instead of the actual data, because they had deliberately broken remote queries for a time. jwhois is also pretty nice.
posted by dorian at 10:32 AM on October 16, 2003

It's my understanding that Verisign paid $20 billion for Network Solutions in 2000.
posted by jazon at 10:39 AM on October 16, 2003

Bear with me, I'm trying to work through the distinctions here... Network Solutions was a business in two parts. One part maintained the .com and .net infrastructure, and leased the right to use *.com and *.net addresses to 3rd parties. The other part offered additional services to those 3rd parties, like email forwarding and hosting. Then, Verisign bought both parts of Network Solutions. Flash forward to now, Verisign decides to sell part of what they acquired when they purchased Network Solutions, namely, the services portion; they retain the registration and infrastructure piece.

Yeah, their "SiteFinder" thing is a piece of invasive shit, so I don't particularly like them, but can someone explain why this sale of the businesses Verisign doesn't care about is big news?
posted by JollyWanker at 11:14 AM on October 16, 2003

The best whois site is whois.sc.
posted by riffola at 7:43 PM on October 16, 2003

Not bad, riffola, but if you want to do a whois on domains other than .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz or .us, try CoolWhois.
posted by dg at 9:23 PM on October 16, 2003

>I thought that the definitive whois for a domain, was the registrar of that domain?

It is, but how does one know the registrar without checking with the root servers at least once?
posted by shepd at 11:07 PM on October 16, 2003

They already sent some spam about this to my email address. I forwarded it back to them along with a question of why I received it (no unsubscribe links or information where the mail address was pulled from). Ironically I received a form mail saying that Netsol is not responsible for spam using domains they've sold (which is of course right, but THEY were spamming me).
posted by rosmo at 3:58 AM on October 17, 2003

unsubscribe links? rosmo, you may already know this, but "unsubscribe" links are truly that usually only on newsletter-type emails, something you've already signed up for or someone has actively registered you for. "Unsubscribe" links on spam are ways of telling them "please send me more spam."
posted by soyjoy at 7:16 AM on October 17, 2003

To add to what SoyJoy just said, use of an unsubscribe link in any spam email allows the spammer to know which emails are viable and active. Even though you obviously don't want their solicitation, it tells them you're there, and that the email address in question has not been abandoned. So they then put your name and addie on a different list that they may email again regarding a different product or service themselves (from a different email address which spammers go through like disposable diapers) and WILL sell or give said list to other spammers.

Is this legal or ethical behavior? Probably not, but since when have legalities or scruples stopped spammers before? And also keep in mind that a spammer only needs one out of a thousand people to respond favorably, in order for spamming to be worth their while, so if you have EVER purchased something via spam, even if it turned out to be a legitimate business transaction and you weren't rooked, it doesn't matter. You supported their efforts by responding to spam. You contributed to their delinquency. Enabler.

The only way to stop it is to make it unviable. In other words ignore spam.
posted by ZachsMind at 7:45 AM on October 17, 2003

It is, but how does one know the registrar without checking with the root servers at least once?

agreed, but I think we were talking about whois being redirected/hijacked to netsol, not name services.

to add to what ZachsMind just said, please turn off html rendering in your mail-reader software. aside from the fact that html mail is just plain wrong... even if you don't reply/unsubscribe/&c. to spam, a lot of the times there will be those little "web bug" dealies that load an invisible image on the spammer's webserver which is another way that they can verify that their spam has been received by a valid email address and read. or at the very least, get an email software that allows you to disable "loading remote images" (i.e. NOT outloook/OE/usw...)
posted by dorian at 12:00 PM on October 17, 2003