Although there may continue to be some technical problems with IDNs, it is important for us all to be able to generate IDN renewal revenue. As such, we should not discourage registrants from renewing them because there are still technical problems.
The fact is that Verisign plans on requiring registrants to pay for IDN renewals starting in March. We should be supportive of Verisign's actions in this regard as there are a significant number of renewals at stake. Resellers benefit if the existing free renewals are stopped and registrants must pay to renew. In fact, the whole value chain benefits - Versign, Tucows and Resellers. Only registrants suffer, as they are not provided with sufficiently high quality service. But then again, who are we to decide what is sufficiently high quality - for many registrants there is still value in having a less than perfect IDN solution as opposed to having nothing at all. We are all in a great position here. Verisign is the bad guy for requiring payment for these renewals - Tucows and resellers have no choice but to go along with them and enable these renewals (but Verisign, Tucows and resellers all benefit from a revenue perspective). This is not to say that we should not work towards resolving the remaining technical problems with IDNs. Alan Hutchison Director, Product Management Tucows ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ross Wm. Rader" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Marc Schneiders" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Robert L Mathews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2003 7:42 AM Subject: Re: Back to the products (Re: [TLDA-Members] Fwd: BulkRegister partners with New.Net) > > You are right. May I use this occasion to ask you/Tucows to clear up the > > darknesses surrounding IDNs? It is a product, sold to/through us in > > 2000/2001 by Tucows. What do we advise the registrants? Renew? Forget > > about it? I see a lot coming up for renewal in Spring in our reseller > > account (European languages were introduced later than oriental, that's > > why). > > > > Some light, please. > > > > And what exactly happens to the IDNs in .org? > > The long and the short is that IDNs have been a travesty. I'd like to say > that I had some complete answers for you, but the fact is that we were sold > a bill of goods and now we need to wait for make good. I have a lot of hope > for the concept, but this paricular product has been less than pleasing from > most perspectives. > > The official answer is that the IDN product manager isn't back in the office > until Monday (vacation) - I'll ping him and see what the scoop is re: > renewals, light, customer guidance etc. I've tried to stick my head in the > sand out of embarassment regarding this particular mess, so I don't have > easy answers at my fingertips. New quote: Denial is great until your > customers start asking serious questions ;) > > -rwr > >
