Singing Potatoes
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Thursday, 28 March 2002
Slam, bam, thank you, ma'am.

Yesterday, I received a letter from VeriSign (motto: The Value of Trust™), labelled Expiration Notice - Reply by April 19, 2002. Inside, it contained an expiration notice and renewal form, indicating that www.shipbrook.com needed to be renewed.

I was somewhat upset, as last month, my Webhosting service had sent me an email giving me 24 hours' disconnection notice, despite the fact that I had just paid for two years' renewal. (That turned out to be a bug in the billing system.) Assuming that they had taken my money and not paid it out to VeriSign, I called them up again to inquire why I was receiving this renewal notice when I'd paid for two years.

It turns out that they have nothing to do with VeriSign. The fine print on the back of the renewal notice reveals that by signing the form, I'm authorizing them to be my new domain name registrar — a practice known in the long-distance telephone industry as "slamming", and illegal in the United States (though only telephone service is addressed by the law).

VeriSign has been taking some heat for this practice, which is incredibly ironic given that they were accusing their competitors of doing that very thing last year.

Apparently, the Value of Trust™ isn't very high.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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