Way back in the mists of time - January this year to be exact - in my Backspin column I wrote about Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) and its practice of "front running." Allow me to quote myself to explain front running:

“Let's say you were starting a new company and you were going to, oh, I don't know, say, sell VoIP to retired sailors. You might have an "ah ha" marketing moment and decide that "callmeishmael.com" was the perfect domain name. (I use this name merely as an example because it amuses me; someone currently owns it and wants $2,288 for it. Good luck to them.) / So, with dreams of naming perfection and a subsequent IPO dancing in your head, you might well have gone to Network Solutions and searched the Whois service to see if the name was available. Should you have done so you would have run up against what others discovered: The name you just searched for was available but with a four-day 'lock' on it set by Network Solutions. This lock meant that you couldn't register the domain with a more reasonably priced registry service.”

Given that NSI charges $34.99 for a one year registration while many other registrars charge under $10 for more or less the same service means that NSI is performing something not entirely dissimilar to highway robbery ("your money or your domain name!").

I got no official response from NSI and the company (as far as I could determine) curtailed this ethically untenable practice.

There was a side effect of NSI’s practice that enabled an equally uncivilized practice: Domain tasting. A domain taster is someone who registers a desirable domain name and tries to sell it within the five day grace period. If they cancel the registration under the terms of registrar contracts with ICANN (the quasi-governmental organization that regulates the domain industry) the domain registration price is refunded. A taster’s life was very easy because NSI made the names of locked domains available to anyone who cared to examine a special domain server of theirs called reserveddomainname.com!

As an added twist when tasters cancel their registrations within the five day grace period and then re-register them, try to sell them, cancel, re-register, try again to sell them, cancel yet again and so on they are guilty of “domain kiting.”

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.