Basically what they have done is use wildcard matching, which makes every single site you can dream up 'exist' in the purest sense of the word . This means that it will be returning a page for any entry you happen to type in whether it really exists or not, and believe me they all go there now. A string of 50 random alpha numeric charecters will land you at their site. This is just plain wrong and is most definately not only anti competitive, but in my opinion a violation of the trust that has been endowed to them as the monopoly assigned to manage all the top level domain names on the internet.

This is where things get very interesting in the anti competition front, let me tell you a small story. At my place of employment, the previous Technology Manager used verisign.com to register and maintain all of our domain names. I have had very many dealings with this company over the years (none very pleasurable), and as our domain names grew close to expiry I have been moving them to various different registrars. Anyone who has had any experience trying to get support from Verisign or Network Solutions will understand why.

In the effort to move a domain recently, we had very many problems trying to make the transition due to random failures, approval email messages that got 'lost somehow' according to their support, registrar locks that had to be disabled multiple times by both myself and their support staff, and various other random problems that were beyond ours or the new registrars control. All in all it took 5 lengthy long distance phone calls to their tech support (at our expense), courier delivered paperwork sent to them to prove that we are who we say we are and that we in fact did own the domain name, and pretty much anything else they could find to bog down the process. A month later, and finally the domain name in question was transferred to the new registrar, phew. Now things seemed to be great, but . . .

Over the last 3 weeks our company has received a large number of voice mail messages from a computerized system apparently warning that our domain name was about to expire and that if we didn't immediately re-register it with their company we would lose it. If this happened once or twice I could be forgiving, but today alone there has been 6 of these calls put into our voice mail system. This is wrong on several accounts. The domain name in question was registered with another registrar and is in fact not due for expire for another 5 years. Also the wording in their voice mail (and who knows how many emails now as I've set my spam filters to get them) seems to lead you to the fact that if you don't register it specifically with them that we would lose the domain in question, which is also incorrect.

Given the fact of all the anti competition claims made against the company, I felt it was my duty as an upstanding netizen to include this into the information gathering online on the issue. All attempts to contacts I attempted to make with them either by phone or via email to have us removed from their email and calling lists were completely ignored to date; we have not even recieved an acknowledgement that they reveived this info, let alone whether they are willing or not willing to comply with our wishes to be removed.

This is about as bad as it gets from where I see things, especially coming from the single company that has been fostered with the care of all internet domains. I really hope that more people will be vocal in this battle and share their experiences with said company so that things can get straightened out with this monopoly that is in place. It is bad for everyone in my opinion to let this continue.

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