The situation is messy, like it is with many old domains. The client registered a domain years ago through his internet connection provider. At the time, that was Earthlink. They registered the domain with Network Solutions as a Network Solutions reseller. The client decided to use my service to manage his website. We took over email, domain hosting, etc. As is traditional in this situation, we changed the record to reflect our name servers. Unfortunately, we couldn't manage to negotiate moving the domain name registration so we launched with Earthlink still controlling the account through their reseller account at Network Solutions.

This is a far too common situation with domains that have been around several years. Clients often don't know how to access and control their own domain name registration. They rely on their hosting company to do that sort of thing for them. And, those companies often make it quite painful to make changes.

Someone, perhaps Earthlink or perhaps Network Solutions, change the name servers listed for the domain, reversing it back to name servers Earthlink owns and removing the name servers we requested a month ago. They did this without warning or authorization. On Saturday, January 9, 2010 email and the website reverted to the old services provided by Earthlink. The domain had not expired, nobody requested the change. They just changed the name servers in the registration record. Slowly, as cache expired around the world, email and the website reverted to the old location at Earthlink's old services. This is when it came to our attention, and we immediately began begging Earthlink to remedy the error.

24 hours has passed - no remedy.

I called Earthlink technical support. They are very polite and well spoken eastern people, but not technically able to solve any problem, not able to do what any of [my customers] can do: actually change the name servers back. If you make a change in my registrar services, the change is virtually instant. It may take a while to populate through the root servers, but that's a few hours and not days or weeks. My experience with Earthlink is that they do nothing quickly. It took four days to change the name servers recorded with the domain last time.

Someone may ask, "Why would they just randomly change the name servers?"

I don't know. I don't know that they did. It's unlikely that Network Solutions made the change. But, Network Solutions simply won't talk to me about it. It's an Earthlink reseller account, so it's an Earthlink problem.

Basically, Earthlink has hijacked the domain and there's nothing we can do but wait on them to give it back to us. I'm not yet convinced there's any way to retrieve the domain from their clutches without their cooperation. And, they are simply unmotivated to help.

Transfer the domain. The problem is this is often thwarted with some painful process rule, like you can't move a domain within 60 days of a change to the admin record or they require you to know your account credentials to retrieve the auth code to transfer the domain. It's like someone designed these rules to frustrate people with broken domains to force them to just wait out the incompetent reseller. Eventually the reseller will make the change in the record so email and domain services will begin working again. That's a few days, if not weeks of downtime.

Bottom line is, Earthlink doesn't care and Network Solutions policies impede an immediate solution.

Update: Spoke to Earthlink and Network Solutions on the phone. Neither seem able (willing) to solve the problem speedily. Many smaller companies can make this kind of change virtually instant.

Via Twitter, I've heard from someone at both companies. Public venting gets attention once again. It will be interesting to see if they can expedite the resolution. I've already started the process to move the domain out of Earthlink's control, but NetSol told me it would take 48 hours.

If someone at NetSol could expedite that transfer (which is done instantly if you're with a Tucows reseller), that would solve the problem today. It's a matter of will, not technical difficulty. It's literally someone keying in the correct name servers into a web interface and clicking a submit button if they would fix the name servers. It happens instantly. Transferring ownership isn't complex either. NetSol owns the equipment, databases and software that controls the Earthlink interface. They could override it in seconds.

Update 2: I called Earthlink again to see if I could get the auth code to transfer the domain. When he asked why I wanted to change the name servers back, I explained it wasn't any of his business and I just wanted him to fix it. He then told me that they changed the name servers because they had upgraded the hosting services (which we weren't using). I then asked if he could expedite the change, and he told me that he had no way to contract name registration services and that submitting the ticket was the only option he had. I still don't have an auth code to move the domain or any idea how long they intend to backlog or wait to update the name server information.