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Last night I’ve got mail. One of the letters was from a collection agency - they wanted to collect $21.30 on behalf of Verizon phone company. Turns out - I owe these monies to Verizon as a “final bill” - some last minute money extortion policy that they enforce. Apparently, someone at the billing department forgot to send me that one “final bill” in February, when I switched off my land line.

So what’s a poor man to do? I called Verizon. Their local phone number is utilizing the latest and greatest in voice recognition technology. Whenever you call that local number an annoying female voice comes up and starts asking a zillion of questions. Is this the number you’re calling about? Am I right that this isn’t the number? What is the number you’re calling about? Is this the number you’ve said you’re calling about? What is the matter of the call? And so on and so forth…

First problem is that you have to answer every single question in loud clear voice. In almost any environment, except your sound-proof basement there will be a background noise. Sometimes the noise is so significant that system doesn’t recognize a word from what you’re saying. Sometimes you are in a public area or at the office, or in lunch room. Oh, and SPEAKING OUT LOUD YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER, LAST 4 NUMBERS OF YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY AND FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER WITH EXPIRATION DATE IS A WRONG AND STUPID IDEA! Hello, do you hear me now?!

I had to hang up and try again. After several attempts I got through to the live person and was told that “there is no person here, at Verizon, who would take your payment over the phone“. Everything has to be done via automated system that I already have been through. The evil, vicious circle was now complete.

My guess is that somehow I will be able to figure out how to get those money to Verizon. Worse case scenario - I’ll go through the collection agency that sent me the bill. What I see is that Verizon, apparently, cutting every possible cost on land line phone business. Obviously, billing department has to have much more thorough training than people who answer the phones first. I expect the service fully fold to total uselessness in about a year or so. Given the rate with which people turn down landlines in preference of IP-based phones and cell phones, I really think landlines would be few and scattered. The tech support would be outsourced to India where poorly trained and badly English-speaking low-wage people will make you want to go back to automated voice-recognition system. Land line is doomed!

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After numerous confirmations of scam-like business practices, Network Solution is now looking into implementing a feature that will allow users to “lock” domain for 4 days, instead of doing this for them automatically. Ironically, this feature look just awfully familiar - just like “domain tasting”. With difference being that now anyone can lock the domain without even providing their contact info. Don’t even need to set up various fake registrars to grab and drop domains for tasting, just keep searching for it.

Another bad trick here is that since domain name would appear registered - there is a very good chance squatters may snipe it right the moment it will be released. And it is already very well known what it means. Some of my clients paid pretty large sums for their trademarked name - just to get it faster then through the lawsuit.

Interesting facts:

• In 2000 Network Solutions was purchased by Verisign for $21 billion.
• In 2007 they were purchased for $800 million.

My take? If you have domain names at Network Solutions - move them to someone not so dangerous. GoDaddy, Moniker or NameCheap (we use all three of them) look much better.

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(initially this was a reply to the discussion on WebHostingTalk in regards to the .ws domain name for web hosting business web site)

Running your company’s web site doesn’t really require .com domain. However, for marketing purposes, .com domain is almost a necessity, since most people are so much used to all domain names ending in .com (unless you are running del.icio.us, but that’s whole another story and you wouldn’t need an advice in such a case). One of our clients is running a web site with .us domain (actually, he’s the only client who has a non-dot-com domain, as far as I know), but he is marketing to a different niche and in a different way.

In the early days of .biz and .info these TLDs were offered at a huge discount, or even for free. A lot of fraudsters, scammers and spammers have grabbed nice looking domains in those zones which led to the common perception of these domains as “knock-offs”, “fakes” or businesses in third-world countries that shouldn’t be trusted. Currently it’s not exactly true, but that’s what we usually hear from prospective clients when choosing domain name for their web sites.

.COM is a must if you are running E-commerce web site. I would also suggest same approach if you are running web hosting business. There are a lot of aftermarket names you can snatch for a very low fee (we also have some hosting domains for sale). If that’s too expensive - your business model must be wrong.

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