A Los Angeles law firm filed a lawsuit Monday against Network Solutions LLC, one of the biggest sellers of domain names, alleging the Herndon, Va., company improperly profits from the way it reserves a domain name after a potential customer searches for it.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in the central district of California, also named the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit body that coordinates key facets of the Internet's domain-name system. Neither Network Solutions nor Icann had any comment on the suit. The lawsuit was filed by Kabateck, Brown, Kellner LLP.
The litigation stems from Networks Solutions' adoption of a policy in early January aimed at curtailing so-called front-running, which occurs when someone learns of a potential customer's interest in a given domain name, buys it before the customer does and then sells the name to the customer at an inflated price.
Network Solutions began automatically reserving the searched-for domain name -- the company in effect registers it for itself -- for four days so that front-runners wouldn't be able to buy it before the interested customer does. The problem, according to the lawsuit, is that during those four days, the customer can buy the domain name only from Network Solutions, which charges prices generally several times higher than those of competing domain-name sellers.
Critics of the policy say that customers aren't made aware that merely searching for the name has the effect of registering it by Network Solutions. Last month, the company responded to complaints by providing more information about the change on its Web site.
Source: WSJ
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