Patent Attorney : ‘No one gives a shit about domain names anymore’

Robert Platt Bell is a patent attorney in Jekyll Island, Georgia and he feels “mad as hell” – thanks to .XYZ domains and Network Solutions.

Apparently, Mr. Bell received one email too many from his primary domain registrar, and it’s not for the .com – it’s for the freebie .XYZ he was forced to have a year ago!

Now that the honeymoon is over, Network Solutions is trying to convince him to renew that freebie, at a not so free price:

“Well, the “free” year of registration is up, and Network Solutions is sending out alarmist e-mails that suggest you are about to lose your domain name – a domain name that you ordered.   But of course, you never ordered it, they slammed it on you by negative option marketing.

And I suspect a lot of folks, who don’t understand domain names or are too busy to read the fine print, assume their primary “.com” domain name is about to expire, and thus renew this useless XYZ domain name that they didn’t want, didn’t need, and didn’t order.”

That is understandable, and we’re certain that a lot of others are confused as well.

Mr. Bell, whose blog is named “Living Stingy“, goes on to call this practice out:

“To me, this is deceptive marketing – sending out an e-mail that claims that I “ordered” this service and then making vaguely threatening noises that I am about to lose my domain name forever.”

So it’s clear that Mr. Bell is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. In fact, he’s mad at the concept of domains in general, as in the comment section he includes the following:

“The truth of the matter is, of course, that no one gives a shit about domain names anymore. There are still a few clueless geeks out there who are stuck in the 1990’s and think they can sell domain names for millions of dollars.

Google basically killed off the domain name business. People find things online with search engines, mostly Google, not by randomly typing in domain names.

In fact, if you try to find things by domain name, all you will likely do, is be steered to a Russian Porn site.

And of course, with smart phones, even Google searches are passe.

So the idea of “losing” my domain name doesn’t frighten me. I would just register something else, or in fact, use the URL of my google sites or whatever.

Domain names are about as worthless as AOL KEYWORDS.

And therein lies the rub – when AOL hit the skids, they resorted to all sorts of negative-option trickery to get people to keep paying. It seems the domain name registrars are doing the same dance.”

Wow.

This “mad as hell” response is truly epic. Thank you, Mr. Bell! 😀

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