I have been an OpenSRS reseller and a member of this list since April 2000. Although domain name registration is not my primary business, it continues to be an important part of my overall plan. My account has brought 4,931 domain-years of business to Tucows so far.
Those of us who have been here for awhile can recall dozens of reseller issues that have come up, arguments pro and con, statements by Tucows addressing the problems, and eventually a resolution. If you look back at the responses in the early days and compare them to those of more recent times, you can't help but get a sense of a change in attitude at Tucows. The focus now seems to be more on "the numbers" and less on the merits. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a capitalist through and through. The job of every business is to be profitable, and you cannot ignore the numbers. But there is a difference between observing good results from focusing on customer needs, and focusing only on the results. The earlier approach at Tucows seemed to be to provide what customers asked for, to do business in a fair manner, and to listen to constructive criticism. The approach was successful, at least from the measure of the number of domain names registered. But as seems inevitable as companies grow, the link between customers and management has grown weaker. I have stayed with Tucows as my primary registrar even though other registrars continue to offer more attractive pricing. (My effective wholesale price at OpenSRS is actually higher today than it was in the early days when there were rebates.) I made this decision consciously based on my experience with Tucows, my concern that a registrar needs to make a certain amount of money to stay in business for the long term, and the overall "good feeling" I had from being an OpenSRS reseller. But the domain name business is in a constant state of flux, and each of us must constantly re-evaluate our supplier relationships. The big question for me is whether or not Tucows actually wants to keep my business. And if they do, how are they showing it? The referral list has been discussed periodically over the past couple of years. The list itself is not an issue for me - I don't want to be on the list because I don't actively market a retail registration business. But seeing how Tucows responds to other "little guys" who do want to be listed is very important to me. It's hard to find any indication that Tucows is actively trying to promote the small reseller. I would think anything they could do to help the little guy to become more successful would be good for their business. (I would also think the biggest resellers are the more likely candidates to become accredited registrars and leave the fold.) Recently I brought up Verisign's upcoming Secondary Market Program, looking for a committment from Tucows that it would be offerred through OpenSRS resellers. I may be alone in my opinion that SMP will be a major factor in choosing a registrar in the year to come, but the fact is that it is a wholesale registry product, and the business of registrars is to supply registry products to their customers. I felt the choice to not provide the service could be a costly one for Tucows, but in a private email a Tucows representative told me, "...we do not have the resellers that would leave us over not offering this product, and if the clients we do have in this industry do leave, there would be little to no impact to our operations whatsoever..." Would the "old Tucows" have responded in this manner? I realize a lot of Tucows' success can be attributed to Network Solutions' disastrous business practices. OpenSRS was started at the right time with the right message to catch a large part of the mass exodus from NSI. And it has been fashionable to trash NSI and Verisign, which has led to an automatic disdain for anything coming from Verisign. But like it or not, Verisign is the com/net registry, and every .com and .net domain name registered or renewed is the sale of a Verisign product. The registrar is selling a commodity item. Sure, there are things that differentiate OpenSRS from NSI, Register.com, and the over 100 other registrars that now exist. But the core function of a registrar is to provide registry products efficiently. And when a registrar decides not to offer a new registry product, they force their customers to go elsewhere to buy that product. It is hard to understand a registrar willingly sending their customers to other registrars. It comes off as arrogant to say, "If you need that, then we don't need you." Now it appears as though WLS is coming. Will Tucows condemn WLS as another Verisign travesty of fair trade, or embrace it as a new product some customers may actually want to purchase? Tucows, now with a stock price of 23 cents and a market cap of under 15 million, has become the number two registrar in terms of com/net/org registrations in less than three years. That's a fantastic achievement. It would be easy to think, based on that success, that everything is rosy and future success is assured. Complacency is dangerous, and things happen fast in the domain name business. I hope someone at Tucows is watching the trends, looking ahead at the winds of change, and making plans for continued success in the future. I know I am.
