Comment by jcrawfordor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcrawfordor | Hacker News Reader

NetworkSolutions has an interesting history of having been fortunate enough to be issued a monopoly by the US Government in the early days of the internet. This placed them firmly into the defense industrial complex, and for a time they were a subsidiary of major defense contractor SAIC/Leidos. Ultimately, though, NS cranked up rates so high that complaints from industry were a big factor in precipitating the formation of ICANN. NS reacted to the loss of their monopoly by going almost comically far in the direction of the villain, and has spent the better part of 30 years desperately trying to entrap their customers due to their general failure to innovate.

Of course that's a very critical take on the company, but I don't think I'm anywhere near alone in finding it frankly astounding that NetworkSolutions still exists as a major concern. The writing was on the wall for NetworkSolutions, as far as technical leadership, by the time they went public. Despite this investors have seen them as a milkable cow and the cash grab continues to the present.

> NS cranked up rates so high that complaints from industry were a big factor

Maybe complaints from domain squatters. I wish domains still cost $100/year. Before that, you had to know Jon Postel to get one. If everyone can buy something for 50 cents then it doesn't have a whole lot of prestige anymore. If a domain costs 50 cents then all you're doing is attracting the sorts of people who only want to contribute 50 cents of value. What would have happened if that had been the government's policy during the western homesteading era? Expensive means the people who buy will be likely to use rather than squat. Expensive means you could get a good domain without having to buy from random guy. Expensive means people become more creative with the way they use domains. For example, I thought it was cool the way universities used to buy a single top-level domain, and then delegate sub-domain authority to departments, and they could delegate fourth level labels. That can't happen anymore because browser security policies evolved under the assumption that second level domains are cheap so it's no longer possible to have meaningful boundaries within a domain. So because of speculation we have a more fragile internet.

I wish domains still cost $100/year. Before that, you had to know Jon Postel to get one

I can't be the only one that remembers the (free) email robot that would assign domains in the early 90s. And I don't know Postel.

My first few domain names were registered in 1995 when the turn-around time on the email template was about three weeks. I barely missed registering kl.com. There was a minor error on my template (name servers). Three weeks later I got the error message and immediately resubmitted but someone else had also submitted a registration in the meantime and theirs was processed before mine. I had to settle for kl.net.

It was at roughly that same time that I got ASSIST.MIL (the first CERT for all of DOD) up and running inside the span of a single week.

That was one of my proudest accomplishments during my time as the DISA.MIL Technical POC. That shit wasn’t easy back then.

I also remember those dark days of having to use those temperamental and brittle email forms. I also remember how the turn around time was measured in days. Better hope you didn’t make any mistakes!

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