>
> Equally, we think Tucows has very high ideals and that, among other
things,
> is why we chose to be a reseller. However, we think the first order of
> business is to serve the direct customer (we the resellers), and to shake
> out those who are/maybe unscrupulous - which is good for all
> concerned. IOW, let us look out for our customers and y'all (that's a TX
> term) look out for us.
>
> So, it wouldn't take a lot of rocket science programming to send the admin
> contact an email, whenever the admin contact or the name servers were
> changed, would it? Those are the two ingredients to hijacking the domain
> -- shouldn't you be doing that already, since the consumer is more
> important than your real customer, by all appearances, anyway?
>
> There has to be a certain element of trust in any business deal. From all
> appearances, however, Tucows does not trust their resellers and that does
> not make for a good relationship, either in the short or long term.
>
I couldn't agree more with most of your points. Please however, keep in mind
that we are first bound to our relationship with ICANN & Versign. They hold
the reins in this relationship. What I was trying to get at in my earlier
email was that we can only do what the contracts allow us to do. No matter
how right, or how reseller-centric some of our ideas may be, we are
prevented from implementing some of them based on what ICANN & Verisign says
we can and can't do.
Any appearances of mistrust on ur behalf, in my opinion, completely stems
from this dynamic.
As far as the triviality of proposed changes to the system, please bear in
mind that while a year ago, the system was essentially running on one server
and based on PERL, MySQL and Linux - it is a much different proposition
today. A year ago, there were about 20 people involved in the project, today
there are more than 200. With growth comes complexity. While the simple
conception of these ideas are relatively straightforward, implementation is
another thing completely. Whereas a year ago I could call up a programmer
directly and say "Hey, cool idea, let's drop it into production and if
nothing breaks, lets consider it a done deal", today the process is much
more involved. While I can't say that I've personally adjusted to the "new
way" of doing things completely yet, I can say that things are being done
this way now because we do care about our relationships and our resellers.
At this point, we have made a conscious decision to sacrifice expediency for
quality. And you know what? I think it's starting to show.
Anyways, I could probably continue this "essay" for another couple 'o
hundred words or so, but let me wrap it up prematurely... The genesis of
this project coincided with a realization by our team that Network
Solutions had completely ignored the biggest source of their sales - the
ISPs, webhosters etc. that actually sold the domains on their behalf. We
have not forgotten what got us to this point, and I don't see us forgetting
anytime soon.
-rwr
