Internet Market Close Report for 1998.09.18

We suspect that NSOL’s leadership position may help keep it ahead of any rivals. But we also think Network Solutions must shift to more ecommerce services to businesses and those registering domains.

That database is 2 million strong already, those who’ve registered a .com domain.

Is Network Solutions another Netscape, missing a key business opportunity while thinking its natural “default” monopoly status is perpetual? Netscape has come back but the search engines–all of them–have a combined market value that dwarfs Netscape’s, which Netscape helped build by making them the search on Netscape.com. Each of them paid about $5 million cash over a 24 month period to create companies with several hundred million dollar market caps, more than a billion for some.

Network Solutions, in a similar way, doesn’t seem to get the larger picture: it could be in the Web-marketing and business book space, networking consulting, Web directory, access, content space as a natural offshoot of those who sign up for domains. That’s just the beginning. We think to hedge against the domain name commoditization that’s coming it needs to consider alternatives to being a registration-only operation. Leverage the database.