So there was a lot of talk about Network Solutions and .XYZ yesterday. We had a comment in one thread which led to Michael doing a follow up post and mentioning that specific comment.
The comment was :
“I recently got the email from Netsol offering me a complementary .xyz for my so-so .com free for 1 year. and in order to decline such an offer I had to visit a link and click decline, otherwise the domain would be mine automatically.”
So I called Web.com who owns Network Solutions and Register.com. The switchboard lady Gina transferred me to Network Solutions where I spoke to a Matthew, whose first words were “What is Dot XYZ ?, I have not heard of that”
I explained a new tld etc… I then mentioned the comment on thedomains and asked if new customers would get a matching .xyz with a new .com. He asked me if I saw the email ? I said no, he explained he gets calls all the time from people where they claim to have seen an offer that never existed. He said this offer never existed. That was at 6:18 pm.
I called Web.com just now at 2am my time, the switchboard lady switched me and this time I got a gentleman named Kevin, I asked him what I asked the other gentleman earlier in the day. He put me on hold and said sorry sir none of my colleagues have heard of this offer.
So that is the actual feedback I got when asking about .XYZ giveaways with the corresponding .com.
UPDATE My good friend Matt got this as well and here is the email
Where is the original comment “I recently got the email from Netsol” ? It doesn’t exist, just this reference and Mike’s reference to it.
http://www.thedomains.com/2014/06/03/xyz-gets-almost-18000-registrations-on-day-1-of-general-availability/#comments
Daniel should tell everyone what is going on. But something’s not right for sure.
Anyways, I’m checking the ntldstats.com website right now and it’s currently saying that netsol currently has 27,584 .xyz registrations (72% of all .xyz registrations!). Compare this to the 4,561 .xyz registratrions at Godaddy. Six times more registrations at a registrar which is 3X times more expensive? lol
Also if you look at the zone file and see registered .xyz domains at netsol such as :
00938625.xyz
01051-plus.xyz
023yks.xyz
027yi.xyz
0282ub.xyz
then people start to wonder… Especially since the .com was already registered for those crappy domains on netsol as well. It sure makes people think it’s a “get a free .xyz to complement your .com” deal.
But like I said it’s up to Daniel to tell what is going on. At this point we can only speculate what is going on behind the screens.
I have forwarded the email to Mike after recovering it on my server
UPDATED STORY
Looks like those Netsol regs should not be counted after all 😉
You been in this business a long time Theo is this not crazy or what ?
It’s hardly a surprise, still don’t believe .club is #1 without similar ‘tweaking’.
Arco,
I understand why you would be skeptical given the unusual marketing practices that some of these new top level domains have engaged in. That being said .CLUB has done it the old fashioned way. Hard work and a lot of investment in marketing. To date we still have only registered 46 company names.
Ultimately though the test will be live sites like lovato.club which shows real demand by end users .
as always the real gets revealed – .com owners should save gtld registries.
I never said you were lying Nobody, I stated what Network Solutions said on the phone.
sure i never meant that.
Ok so it’s true, the numbers are boosted by the ““get a free .xyz to complement your .com” deal. Now we have actual proof. Thanks “nobody” and Raymond!
You are welcome, thank you for reading.
.xyz is now 4th the most popular new extension according to ntldstats.com.
When you only count paid registrations they are around the 20th spot (assuming most registrations at netsol are free).
Maybe its also a good idea to contact some random .xyz domain owners who have them with NS and asked how they obtained them.
I’m sure that, since it’s an opt-out kind of deal, that most netsol users who got one (or multiple) of these .xyz domains for free don’t even realize they have the domain(s).
I was under the impression that the ICANN Registry Agreement requires registrars to be treated equally. I’d be curious if other registrars were offered the same promo….
I see a number of problems with that behavior:
Imagine some executive tells his assistant to “go into the GoDaddy Account and extend all domains” – not knowing that there are 25 .com .xyz copies?
What about trademark infringements? OK, probably not with “.xyz” but what if they do that with another TLD, too? It’s a NEW registration – you might have an old (.com) one that is older than a new trademark – but the new registration would qualify for an UDRP – especially if parked!
To auto-grandfather .com owners for free is kind of childish. Not illegal – but shady. There should AT LEAST not be an opt-out but an opt-in!
NetSol employees have no clue about “.xyz” and the auto-grandfathering? Why does that astonish anyone?
First: These marketing actions are planned by different people – and then simply executed.
Second: Why should NetSol reps know “.xyz”? Seriously. Why?
If I had to guess, I would say that what probably happened is that Daniel Negari reached out to NetSol, and offered them to give xyz domains for free to those matching .coms that would not probably be registered anyways in the first year (very long domain names, cryptic names, strange combinations of numbers and letters, etc.).
If you think about it, it is a very smart strategy, since he is giving away domains that would most probably not be registered anyways, while at the same time artificially increasing xyz’s ranking, making it one of the top 10 new gTLDs.
And while in websites like this we may criticize his strategy, the average person will not know about this, but only know that xyz is a very popular extension.
False advertising, and making something out to be something it isn’t, would be considered Fraudlent in most circles, and not smart, but unethical when misrepresenting a producr, and the underlying facts behind it.
Best of luck to you All, but this is not good business.
The domain community is evaluating the success of each new TLD based on registration stats. Well, we are starting to see that there is room for manipulation of registration figures so perhaps we need to consider another metric. I would suggest reported aftermarket sales – of course that figure is going to be pretty close to zero for all new TLDs which is a good indication of how good an investment they are.
Imagine a community full of “For Sale” signs posted in front of nearly every home and yet there is not one reported sale in the last few years. Would you invest there? A reasonable investor would ask why aren’t these properties selling? Noone wants to live there.
To Daniel’s credit, when he said that XYZ would have 1 million registrations by the end of the first year, he never specified whether they would be paid or free, lol
I think to talk about a general “TLD success” is way too opaque.
There seems several measures of success:
– the IMPACT of the TLD on the Internet in terms of TLD brand awareness and usage
– reg numbers
– resale value and volume
– volume of actual Internet traffic routed through the SLD’s of a TLD
– quotient of number of regs and DNS TLD resolve requests
Look at .gov:
– extreme high brand awareness (in the US)
– zero resale value and volume
– very good reg number / DNS resolve quotient
Not all TLD’s are made equal 😉
@ Alexander Schubert I have always thought of you, and the words you spew as a scummy, yet you wish to conversate, among the same domainers you see as only having any value in their death.
I have also had an active negotiation with you, where you saw to poach a prized domain for your so called self, low balling in order to keep a large unused percentage for your own profits, so if anyone is a parasite, I would consider it be you.
http://www.thedomains.com/2013/01/15/alexander-schubert-of-gay-the-only-good-domainer-is-a-dead-domainer/
.gov is a restricted extension, so you can not compare it with open extensions, that have little restrictions, maybe .us would be a better comparison.
Dear Richard S,
this is a free world and everyone is free to say what she or he likes to say: You for example can hide behind a “Richard S” and call me a parasite and scummy – that’s just fine.
In my mind Mikes Blog is a format where serious domain professionals exchange ideas, opinions and information about the DNS: I am a “domainer” since 1997 and never said otherwise. I am still now (mid 2014) a “domainer” with a focus on domain brokerage. I also happen to know one or two things about creating new gTLD’s – with a over 9 year proven record. And people tell me that the strings I chose are not the worst – and one has already a proven record, too.
So if people talk about new gTLD’s I thought my contributions might be valuable.
In case you happen to be at ICANN 50: Feel free to walk up to me; I will accept any and all apologies – no questions asked. Don’t be scared: I neither carry nor do I bite.
And yes: I am aware that .gov is highly regulated – that’s why I chose it as example.
I just wanted to make everyone aware of who you are, and how you operate in a two faced double standard, so if they are ever lowballed by you, they make you, or your clients pay them a nice premium price that all domainers deserve to be paid.
Your actions, and words actually hurt your clients, hope they realize this.
If anyone deserves an apology it is all domainers at large for your remarks, and poor choice of wording.
Let’s hope all your extensions are closed, and restricted so we don’t have to hear about them.
Last year I purchased a .com domain name for a client, NetSol added the .biz domain name without my consent. I’m guessing that since they are charging more than twice for the .com than everyone else, they can afford to give out 1 year free domain and they will make their money back as the domain was put on auto renew. And this is probably coming from the person in charge of email marketing, who does not talk to support people.
Paul
Well now that we have the email offer which was an opt out, not even an opt in, it seems like a waste of time to call people, most probably don’t know they even have the .XYZ domain
There is one voice notably absent from these discussions. Mr. Negari is nowhere to be found. That tells me all I need to know.
There is nothing special about .xyz to help it be successful. It seems like one of the worst new gtld’s yet, so any statistic that shows that it is one of the top gtlds should be met with a good bit of skepticism, in my opinion.
I have no idea why Network Solutions would get involved with this type of opt out system. If people don’t even know they have the name and are set to auto renew next year, that is borderline theft to me and there is no reason for NS to risk its reputation on a very poor extension like. .xyz. Obviously the ultimate responsibility is on the consumer to make sure they know what is in their NS account, but this smells bad. Very bad.
They are not set to auto-renew
“I have no idea why Network Solutions would get involved with this type of opt out system.”
Well, they seem to be running one.
It is the registrar’s responsibility to obtain agreement by the registrant to the registration contract. I’d love to hear the contorted explanation for this promotion, but that explanation would need to come from NSI, not Mr. Negari.
I’d like to know how giving someone a “complimentary” domain name is compliant with the requirement that the registrant affirmatively agree to the registration agreement.
I don’t understand why domainers are focused on registration numbers as a measure of TLD ‘value’ either, since early numbers are easily a function of factors other than what might turn out to be long term popularity.
In the event of an ICANN audit, what is NSI going to produce as evidence that the registrant agreed to the registration?
At one point, folks were saying that the domain names had been under WHOIS privacy, which conceivably means that the proxy provider was “affirmatively agreeing” to the registration agreement (although that’s a stretch). But, it seems that the NSI domains are now registered to actual registrants, rather than under WHOIS privacy?
Stats sites are probably going to have use asterisks next to various registries, just like .tk, so that “apples to apples” metrics comparisons can be made for registries operating in the “usual” manner.
As I found out a while ago when I ordered the overpriced NetSol “privacy” on one .com that ended there from NameJet, the registrant name is not hidden. The same is true for all these XYZ names auto-registered for their .com owners.
They look like NSI proxy registrations where the “registrant” is the putative registrant, but the contact email address is an NSI email address.
If you look up some of the examples Mike listed you see: Real registrants – no Proxy.
The question is whether legally the “opt-out” is kind of an “affirmation”?
“Click here by May 27th” GA wasn’t til June 2nd. How could netsol promise to hold said names to give away for free. I see now, no premium/single word dot com owners received this email. Only owners with names “that would not probably be registered (in xyz) anyways in the first year (very long domain names, cryptic names, strange combinations of numbers and letters, etc.).” As yadgar pointed out.
Slick, dishonest…ZERO integrity, and guess what, you got caught.
Knowing NetworkDisSolutions modus operandi: The ‘you know what’ will hit the fan at renewal time…
Not sure if these unwanted unsolicited domains are being set to Auto-renew.
NetSol and Dot XYZ sleazy Match made in heaven….
Where is ICANT?
In California.
Do you think they know about this? How would they?
I thought they were lost in cyberspace.
They should follow the blogs. They don’t do anything else anyway.
But seriously someone should report this. There is more on this happening. I will make a new post soon.
Well: To whom in the ICANN cloud?
Board? New gTLD committee of the board? Ombudsman? Registry constituency? Registrar constituency?
And what exactly would be the ask? My experience with ICANN tells me: Absolutely no one would feel responsible.
Alexander
Registrar compliance.
I love the way some illiterate moron spelled “complimentary” as “complementary” in the email.
They are two different words.
Who is NSI hiring to write copy?
i also was surprised as english is not my first language and i have never been to USA/UK etc
Well it’s easy to spot, since they spell the same word two ways in the email.
If you own somecrap.com and you get given somecrap.xyz it is both complimentary and complementary is it not?
I do understand that the alleged email has spelled them incorrectly ..
>>If you own somecrap.com and you get given somecrap.xyz it is both complimentary and complementary is it not?
If they used complementary in that context, but they didn’t. I know complementary well. I used to own complementary.com. I always wished I had the better one.
“complimentary” was written 4 times right in that email – and one time not. And in that one instance it can’t be “complementary” – whereas in the 2nd and 3rd mentioning “complementary” would have made sense to some degree.
Auto correct of course doesn’t pick that up. Wait a few years and it will!
Eye dew knot knead aye spill chequer. Eye yam aye grate righter!