

Web.com Acquires Network Solutions for $405 Million + Stock - bhartzer
http://www.elliotsblog.com/network-solutions-acquired-by-web-com-7651

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maqr
In case anyone is unaware, Web.com is a pretty evil company.

From my experience with them, their practice is to sign up businesses to build
a website, but Web.com retains ownership of the domain name. They make it
difficult and costly to move the domain away, as they're the true owners. When
I last interacted with them, I believe the exit fee was something like $150 to
have the domain the customer already thought they purchased be placed in the
customer's name.

In that way, I suppose acquiring Network Solutions makes sense.

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workwells
additionally, web.com owns register.com, which is one of the most difficult
and expensive registrars to work with. Quite a group, Interland, register.com,
and now NetSol. Scary that unsuspecting soles will blindly fall for their
advertising.

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mef
Interesting history: VeriSign acquired Netsol for $21 Billion in 2000, and
then sold them to Pivotal Equity Group in 2003, but did not include in that
sale Netsol's role as the sole registry for .com/net/org TLDs. Today
VeriSign's naming division is the company’s "largest and most significant
business unit".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeriSign>

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techsupporter
Minor nit: .org is run by Public Interest Registry and operated by Afilias.
That TLD was removed from VeriSign's management in 2003 after VeriSign's
contract expired.

<http://www.internic.net/faqs/org-transition.html>

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edwardy20
How do they have enough money to do this? Web.com's (WWWW) market cap is only
236.51M according to Yahoo Finance.

