At 12/20/01 10:54 PM, William X Walsh wrote: >Hmm, I don't know how much credenance to give this, but I've received >an out of band report on this subject that bothers me. > >That OpenSRS is currently letting a reseller pay a fixed monthly fee >for first option on all names being deleted from OpenSRS. > >I really hope this is not true.
Indeed. >This is quite serious if true. This is the kind of thing that becomes >a deal breaker. Agreed; if this is true, I'll be seriously reconsidering my relationship with OpenSRS. This crosses a line I wouldn't in my wildest dreams have thought OpenSRS would even consider; I assumed the initial poster was in the throes of a paranoid delusion because his accusation seemed so farfetched. If true, it makes all the talk about "the domain always belongs to the customer", "the customer always belongs to the reseller", and "we are trying to work with ICANN to make sure that domains are allocated fairly and dropped by other registrars in a timely fashion" look like words that are convenient when it serves OpenSRS's purposes, but easily thrown away when someone approaches with money. I've been thinking long and hard about how to articulate exactly what the problem is here, and this is it: the only reason those expiring domains were registered with OpenSRS in the first place (instead of, say, Dotster) is that resellers like me worked to attract those customers. In exchange for that work (and OpenSRS's $4 profit), they promised to keep their hands out of the pie. According to what I can piece together from the accusations and the vague OpenSRS responses, it looks like OpenSRS believes they have found a "gray area" of the contracts that they think allows them to take ownership of the customer's domain -- the customer I got for them -- and make a profit off it without involving me. I don't think so; I'm not paying a premium wholesale price to deal with a company that looks for loopholes that enable it to do things contrary to the spirit of the whole arrangement. I've been a consistent supporter of OpenSRS because I thought OpenSRS believed in doing the right thing by me, by the customer, and by the domain community in general. If this is true, I'm clearly going to have to reconsider that. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
