Ross,
Actually, I sent the message to you personally And to the list. Sorry
about that, but I am accustomed to hitting the reply button and replying to
the list. The Tucows' lists are the only ones, and I'm on a bunch, where
this technique doesn't work.
No one, I don't think, is expecting or urging Tucows to breach a
contract. That was not the point of my post, either.
The point has been made several times that Tucows must abide by the ICAAN
agreement and I think that everyone respects and expects that. There are,
however, some things that appear not to be direct requirements of the ICAAN
contract.
For instance, is there a provision in the ICAAN agreement which says, to
the affect, "Thou shall not allow the resellers (Tech Contact of domain)
unfettered access to the registration data of their customers, so they can
service the Registrant (their customer)?" I mean a direct and pointed
provision as opposed to someone's imagination (Imagination = something that
was "read into" the contract).
If not, then the logical question is "why do we have to jump through hoops
to service our customers?" Why do we, as tech contact, have to be creative
in order to access registration data to make changes necessary to service
our customers? After all, even today, I can send a template to NSI, as
tech contact, and even make myself the admin contact of the domain, if so
desired.
There were earlier posts about this particular issue and, as I recall, the
substantive reason was to protect the Registrant. IOW, Tucows is
protecting Our customers from Their customer (us)? If this is not an ICAAN
contract issue (and it is doubtful that it is), then this begs the question
of "Why does Tucows feel that their customer is not trustworthy?" After
all, don't all resellers have a contract with Tucows, as well?
There are always going to be unsavory souls who use and abuse the system
for their own, illegal gain. Fortunately, those souls are in the minority
and they are particularly short lived in the ISP business since they
hastily create their own demise. This goes further to the earlier comments
about "hunting mosquitos with 00 buck" and that "there has to be a certain
amount of trust in any business relationship." It also goes to the earlier
illustration of the noble shopping cart author, who essentially did the
same thing, but quickly learned that the butter on his bread tasted much
better than his over-kill nobility felt.
I wasn't really addressing Tucows' ability to implement programming
changes, but since it was introduced into this thread, I do have some
observations.
Most all of us, I suspect, know about growing pains and we all understand
that the Queen Mary can't be stopped or change directions on a dime. Those
are not at issue, at least not in my view.
What we have witnessed in the last several months is that Tucows has been
diverting resources from the core business of wholesale domain name
registration. The resources directed at SSL Certs and an array of other
things, could have (easily I suspect) resolved several fundamental issues
and concerns expressed by your customers. For example, RSP to RSP
transfers and not sending renewal letters to Registrants who are no longer
registered with Tucows, are two which quickly come to mind. I know the
latter was recently fixed, but only after it was well beyond critical mass
and had done some of the very damage which all of your customers wanted to
avoid.
We also understand that it is no longer possible to pick up the phone, talk
to a programmer and make a change overnight. However, it is not like these
two examples just came to mind this morning. In contrast, they have been
long lasting concerns and there has been more than sufficient time for the
Queen Mary to have changed course and stopped and started several, several
times.
Thanks,
At 12:01 AM 4/26/01 -0400, you wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
>I noticed that you sent this to me personally - please feel free to share my
>response with whomever you wish.
>
>-rwr
----
Don Brown - Dallas, Texas USA Internet Concepts, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.inetconcepts.net
PGP Key ID: 04C99A55 (972) 788-2364 Fax: (972) 788-5049
Providing Internet Solutions Worldwide - An eDataWeb Affiliate
----
