regbits

Following some helpful discussions with the registrar data escrow (RDE) working group, the RDE specs have been revised and are attached here.

Attached file(s):

Revised data escrow specs (v0.3)

At the Lisbon ICANN meeting, we saw the beginnings of a good community discussion about improving the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) in light of what we’ve learned from the problems exposed by the RegisterFly situation. Among several issues raised was the very evident friction between RegisterFly (as a reseller for eNom) and eNom, and the problems customers experienced as a result of the breakdown in the relationship.

In the public forum, Elliot Noss of Tucows made the point that resellers serve an important function in that they are typically hosting companies and ISPs, and as such, they tend to have established relationships with the registrants of domain names they resell. Resellers can focus their efforts on creating value-added tools that allow less-sophisticated consumers and small businesses to easily set up a website or an email address, without the overhead of running a registrar at the same time (which obviously requires a significant volume of registration business to justify the expense).

No one disputes that resellers bring value to the marketplace. So when I ask “what’s wrong with resellers?” it should not be interpreted as “there’s nothing right about resellers.”

But I see genuine problems every day with resellers, and by problems with resellers, I suppose I really mean, problems with registrars who use resellers, since the registrar is ultimately responsible for the registrations it places on the registry.

So here’s a short list of common problems I frequently see with (registrars who use) resellers:

1. Because resellers often have relatively close relationships with their customers, their business operations sometimes suffer from what I’d call “trust me syndrome” (TMS).
   TMS can manifest itself in the form of inadequate or nonexistent registration agreements, use of whois privacy services without disclosure to the customer (or without disclosure of the implications of using a privacy service), and internal transfer-out policies that are inconsistent with the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
2. Sometimes small resellers (e.g. where the customer service rep is also the president, CEO, treasurer, bookkeeper, janitor, etc.) take the business a little too personally.
   In the past, this has caused customers difficulty when they try to terminate the services of the reseller. We’ve seen situations where this allegedly caused transfers to be NACK’d without explanation and whois data to be altered without the customer’s consent. (While this is also a potential risk with registrars, it is less likely when the registrar actually values its continued accreditation. A small-time reseller can easily find a new host-registrar for whom it may resell names, so it may not place as much importance on the agreement it holds with its current host-registrar.)
3. While every registrar’s reseller model is different, there are some models that delegate substantial responsibility to resellers, but not all resellers take their responsbilities as seriously as they should.
   By way of example, we saw an enormous uptick in complaints about resellers following VeriSign’s migration to EPP in late 2006. In particular, customers complained that resellers wouldn’t or couldn’t provide auth-info codes for .com/.net names and that requests to the sponoring registrar were met with deflection of the matter to the unresponsive reseller. In some cases, even ICANN’s attempts at intervention were similarly deflected.

These broad points represent the majority of the reseller-related issues that we see. I welcome your thoughts about my thoughts and your suggestions for addressing the underlying problems. I’ll share my ideas next week.