Allen’s E-Commerce Blog

The Mystery of LameDelegation.net - registrars parking your names

Posted by Kevin under Domain Name News, Domain Names

We all know that registrars have started taking ownership of names that registrants let lapse. Registrars even go through their non-resolving names and change them to point their own parking pages instead. So it is always an important task for the domain portfolio manager to keep an eye on their names and where they are pointing to.

One of the latest registrars to join the club, appears to be Melbourne IT with over 21,000 names pointing to the MITparked.com nameservers. They might have been doing this for a while already, but it was new to me when I came across of one of the names in early May. It appears they are using a Yahoo! PPC feed.

So how long before a registry parks your “unused” names for your, out of pure “courtesy”. Well, it turns out that we don’t have to look far (more an that below). And surprise surprise, Verisign and NetworkSolutions (netsol) play a role in this play. No wonder Najafi was able to buy Netsol, the former monopoly registrar for $20 Million and $80 in assumed debt in 2003 and turn around this year and sell the company for $800 million to General Atlantic LLC.

With being THE original monopoly registrar, NetworkSolutions holds many valuable domain names. When the monopoly broke, it was almost the time of the bubble, and to this date NetSol holds many names that were registered for 10 years back then, some of them pointing to NetSol’s own parking page. Some of the expired ones are now listed in the whois with whois privacy, so it’s a safe bet to assume that they were taken over by there registrar.

So what do Verisign and Netsol have in common with some of those valuable names? Enter “lamedelegation.net”. The following graph (from IPWalk) shows the amount of domains pointing to the”lamedelegation.net” nameservers over the previous six months:

Originally the “lamedelegation.net” nameservers were used when a domain’s nameservers were not responding correctly. The registry would then change the nameservers on the domain and notify the registrar, so the registrar can contact the registrant. Today it appears that Network Solutions has made this their “parking nameservers” and it looks like they have been switching all of the non-resolving domains in their registrar over to them.