I'd guess you could make a go of it selling it asRobert, I think all major registrars who offer it charge for it:
an add-on, but honestly, I wouldn't resell it; I don't think it's the right thing to do -- doing that just draws attention to the fact that the current privacy situation is awful, which is counterproductive to non-privacy-enhanced sales. If you could somehow swing it so that all Tucows domains were privacy enhanced at no extra charge, I suspect you'd have a land rush, though.
NetSol $5.00 http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/name-it/private.jhtml
Enom $8.00 http://www.enom.com/help/faq_idprotect.asp
GoDaddy $9.00 https://registrar.godaddy.com/dbp.asp?isc=&se=%2B&from%5Fapp=&prog%5Fid=GoDaddy&authGuid=
and so forth
Since whois output is currently a one necessary evil, all privacy protection does is
changes the whois info to a 3rd party database administrator
- changes email address of the whois output frequently so the whois minded email addresses become obsolete in short time so spammers are selling no good email addresses to each other
- does forwarding of email to designated protected/real email address
(at least these are the characteristics of a service I use and it is well worth the few $ a year since it not only masks but it also actively changes and forwards important communication tome... at least in theory)
Our customers actually demand it, we had a few transferring away from us to registration services that offered it - there is no sense in loosing business because you do not have a feature or two a competition offers. We worked too hard in attracting these customers to us so any tool we can utilize to enhance customer retention and satisfaction is a winner.
I am actually surprised that almost 8% of new domain registrations purchase whois privacy protection and if I translate it to customers because volume domain buyers usually do not buy privacy protection as it gets too expensive for them, the ratio is even better : our stats show that about every 10th customer opts for privacy protection on their domain.
The process is fully automated and not labor intensive for us, so it is a nice revenue addon as well. We do not administer the database - it is all done by a third party provider.. I love it when adding some extra coding to the site and few extra paragraphs of sales and help files turns out to be steady reoccuring revenue maker and customer satisfaction pointer.
Cheers Genie
