Network Solutions Offers 100 Year Domains

[KRL]

These guys must stay up all night thinking how else can we gouge people.




Network Solutions Offers 100-Year Net Addresses

Companies, nonprofit organizations and individuals fearful of losing control over their Internet addresses can lock them down for 100 years under a new service being offered by the world's largest retailer of domain names.

For a lump payment of $1,000 per name, Herndon, Va.-based Network Solutions says it will make sure a customer's Internet address registration stays active and within their control for a full century.

"We've had a number of customers who have allowed high-value domain names to lapse," said Network Solutions chief executive Champ Mitchell, citing two high-profile incidents in which Microsoft accidentally failed to renew its Passport.com address in 1999 and The Washington Post Co. temporarily let its washpost.com domain name lapse earlier this year.

Simple oversights like failing to update information about an expiring credit card or not checking an old e-mail in-box can cause a company to fail to renew key domain names, Mitchell said. "Many of these large customers have thousands of domain names. It's easy to do."

Mitchell conceded that most domain name owners will not want to pay $1,000 up-front for a service that costs less than $40 a year under normal circumstances. But he predicted that there might be up to 10,000 potential customers, including several thousand large companies.

Network Solutions manages roughly 8 million names for approximately 4.5 million customers, classifying 550,000 as "power users." Those are the users Network Solutions is targeting with the new service, Mitchell said.

More than a dozen customers have signed up for the service, but the company declined to identify them.

Internet addresses in popular "domains" like dot-com, dot-org and dot-info can be registered for a maximum of 10 years at a time, according to rules established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based nonprofit organization that oversees the global domain name system under a contract with the U.S. government.

Retail "registrars" such as Network Solutions register names on behalf of their customers. Registrars, in turn, contract with wholesale "registries" such as VeriSign Inc., which maintains the master list of names ending in dot-com and dot-net.

When a customer signs up for the 100 Year Domain Service, Network Solutions will register the address with the appropriate registry for 10 years and put a note in its system to automatically renew that registration when the initial term expires, Mitchell said.

Jonathan Weinberg, a law professor at Wayne State University and an expert in Internet policy, said there's nothing to prevent Network Solutions or any other domain name seller from offering such a service, but he said it could be a bad deal for customers.

"Just as you wouldn't want to be locked into your phone company for the next hundred years, even if they offered you a really good deal on a phone, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be locked in with a domain registration company for the next hundred years," Weinberg said.

The viability of the 100-year offering is also contingent on Network Solutions staying in business for the next hundred years, Weinberg said. "If Network Solutions should go bankrupt 30 years from now or 70 years from now, you're up a creek."

Network Solutions's Mitchell said that if the company were bought out or went bankrupt sometime in the next hundred years, the 100-year registrations would be counted as a liability that the new buyer or bankruptcy court would have to honor.

University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin said the service could have a "mild anticompetitive effect," but added that competitors would be free to offer a similar service.

New York-based Register.com -- one of Network Solutions's largest competitors -- will not follow Network Solutions's lead, said spokeswoman Stephanie Marks.

"We think our customers are smart enough to know that nobody can guarantee a hundred-year registration, and we simply care too much about our reputation to offer something like that," she said.

Weinberg said the other thing people should ask themselves when they consider buying the service is whether Internet addresses will be relevant 50 years down the road. "The entire [domain name system] as we know it today is less than 20 years old, so the odds that 100 years from now that we're going to find Internet resources this way are slim."

But even if the domain name system is no longer in place, Mitchell said that the 100-year registrations will still appeal to the small segment of the market Network Solutions is targeting.

"This is not going to be for everybody or for every name owned by everybody," Mitchell said. But he predicted companies with high-profile domain names will view the fee as a small cost to avoid the potentially debilitating hassles of losing a high-profile address. "Once that happens, even if they realize it quickly and they can reclaim the name, it is really disruptive to their business."

Froomkin predicted that there would be a market for the service. "There are enough companies that have forgotten to [renew] the darn things that you can certainly see why they're doing it."

ICANN spokeswoman Kieran Baker said the group has no stance on the service and would only address the issue if it receives complaints.

Network Solutions was once a division of Internet security and addressing firm VeriSign Inc., but was spun off last year and is now a privately held company.

[Theo]

im gonna offer 100year registrations for $400

they can sue me after death

[Corleone]

Originally posted by Soul_Rebel
im gonna offer 100year registrations for $400

they can sue me after death

[riosluts]

hahah. thats really funny. Maybe if you owned sex.com How do you know your going to be running the same site in 1 year, 2 years or even 5 years. Let alone 100. Its a dumb idea. Total FLOP

[StuartD]

Perfect!! Cause I don't want anyone to get their hands on newagedumbassbitches.com until I'm 128 at least!

[Tight]

10-20 years maybe, 100 years is TOO long.

[Jer]

Network Solutions just want some press.

[axelcat]

[beemk]

i wonder if someones actually dumb enough to buy it

[goBigtime]

Um.

This idea is fucking gold.


(For the people doing the registrations)

[JFK]

Fuck that shit , 125 yrs or nothing! I plan to be around for a while

[markell]

Originally posted by riosluts
hahah. thats really funny. Maybe if you owned sex.com How do you know your going to be running the same site in 1 year, 2 years or even 5 years. Let alone 100. Its a dumb idea. Total FLOP

if you dont run it you can sell it.. especially if its a high profile domain

[polish_aristocrat]

KRL, but aren't you going to make use of it with men.com ?

[NiTe-HaWk]

Good thing if you are going to jail for maybe 30 years and want to keep your site running

[AlienQ - BANNED FOR LIFE]

Sounds like a good idea.

Ya cant argue with commerce.

[kimzar]

network solutions are crooks

[goBigtime]

They key here is they aren't registering your domain for 100 years. They are doing 10 year registrations every 10 years for 10 years.

This means, assuming a cost of $6/domain...


$60 to register the domain the first 10 years.
'
$400 profit

And the $540 left over can go into an interest bearing account for 10 years

Then they pay another $60

Then $480 is in the intrest bearing account for another 10 years...

... until the original money is gone.

It's gold.



There will be spin offs of this one... lots of people undercutting NSOL. You will probably see people offering this 100 year service for around $500.

[doornx]

Originally posted by goBigtime
They key here is they aren't registering your domain for 100 years. They are doing 10 year registrations every 10 years for 10 years.

This means, assuming a cost of $6/domain...


$60 to register the domain the first 10 years.
'
$400 profit

$540 that can go into an interest bearing account for 10 years

Then they pay another $60

Then $480 is in the intrest bearing account for another 10 years...

... until the original money is gone.

It's gold.



There will be spin offs of this one... lots of people undercutting NSOL. You will probably see people offering this 100 year service for around $500.

nice profit indeed...$1000 smackers is quite a lot...especially with the shit left you can register nowadays. 10 years top...i hate the year to year basis also for high profile domains

[goBigtime]

The problem is NSOL will get the jump on everyone and probably spam out the service offering to everyone saying it's a transactional mailing or something.