Network Solutions has always had appalling business practices that verged on the criminal. Some years ago, they poached a domain my wife had registered with another vendor, by sending her a misleading renewal letter. That particular event ultimately wound up with them at the receiving end of a class action suit.
I absolutely refuse to ever register another domain with them. Their business practices are about as evil as I've ever seen from such a mainstream company.
I prefer their other method of registering domains that you checked for whether or not they were available. They would then charge a premium to get that domain.
Anyone else remember "Network Solutions Sucks Balls"? (http://networksolutionssucksballs.com ended up being registered by Network Solutions under this method.)
I don't think it happens any more. ICANN added a nonrefundable registration fee and "domain tasting" stopped being such a pervasive problem. This either solved what Net Sol was trying to protect users from, or removed the justification they were using (depending on how cynical you are).
Not sure I would ever recommend testing domain names on NetSol's WHOIS server though.
Every year without fail I keep getting a letter to my business address asking to renew my domains. Lucky I'm the one that deals with such matters so the letter can go to the correct place for such things (the shredder). But I can see how the non-technical person at a business could be fooled for transferring away their domains to a very expensive provider.
Maybe this is the sort of fee that would have prevented that transfer. Kind of - "gee that's a nice store you have here, pity if something happened to it".
I absolutely refuse to ever register another domain with them. Their business practices are about as evil as I've ever seen from such a mainstream company.