what’s wrong with resellers?
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:
- 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. - 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.) - 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.
Comments (6 comments)
how can you immediately judge that the problem are resellers?
i hope that you are educated enough to know that these resellers are the people who are bringing big revenue to this ICANN Accredited Registrar “thing”.
if you will be analyzing; your organization has really no function at all most especially with the incident of Registryfly.
you cannot even help immediately an ordinary complainant if there domains are locked by a certain provider.
i think ICANN should study their policies first before putting blames with the resellers.
please remember that it is not the size of organization that you should measure but instead the attitude of each provider.
i also want to ask you what’s wrong with the ““trust me syndrome” - maybe you are not trustworthy that’s why this is a big deal with you.
i think the best thing that you can suggest is to find a trustworthy provider because that is the ultimate problem and not any form of business relationship.
Justmeph:
I addressed your concerns in my post. Hopefully you read the whole thing, not just the piece Jay quoted on the DomainTools blog.
I said, above:
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.”
And as for trust-me-syndrome, the problems I described above are precisely what’s wrong. Specifically, some resellers don’t use registration agreements that conform with ICANN policies, some don’t actually allow the end customer to “own” the name even though they paid for it (by not putting the customer’s name in Whois). In some cases, there’s no harm done, but in others, there is real harm to consumers.
These observations are based in fact, not some random notion. Setting aside Registerfly (who also caused serious problems as a reseller), resellers are the largest source of transfer-related complaints I receive.
Mike Zupke / April 22nd, 2007, 8:05 am / #
Reply to this commentHi Mike,
I first saw a summary of your post (only your three points) on the DomainTools blog, and I was not impressed. I came here and found that your introduction to your three points was a little more comforting to my future as a six-year reseller of Tucows/OpenSRS.
On point 1:
* I can only speak as a Tucows/OpenSRS reseller, but we have had to sign contracts in order to become and remain a reseller, and the contracts stipulate that our Web site is to include domain-registration agreements, just as is the case with an accredited registrar.
* Because our interfering in a transfer out could impact Tucows’ accreditation, I am quite certain that Tucows would breathe heavily down our necks were we to behave in a manner inconsistent with the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
* As for privacy services — these have been poorly implemented from the start because of (as I recall) a distinct lack of co-operation or lethargic co-operation from ICANN. This is not a reseller issue, and is apparent even with domains registered with accredited registrars who offer a privacy service.
On point 2:
* I completely agree that a small company as you describe can take the loss of business personally. I have seen this myself, as well as other examples in this point.
* Again, as I state above, interfering with transfers out can and should garner attention from the accredited registrar for which the reseller is selling, in line with the contract between the reseller and the registrar which in turn should be in line with the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy and any other contracts between the registrar and the registry.
* As for changing a customer’s WHOIS data without consent — again speaking only as a Tucows reseller, this is difficult for us to do. Domains registered through us are registered to our customer, with them as the organisational, administrative and billing contacts. We usually like to have our company listed as the technical contact, but in eleven years in this business I’ve yet to see the technical contact be used for the purpose for which it was intended. (It’s just another target for spammers.) To this end the Tucows reseller interface does not include an option to have log-in information sent to the technical contact (which can be changed from us without our consent anyway), so unless we engage in clearly illegal activities involving interception of e-mail (assuming we host the customer in question), we simply cannot access our customer’s domain accounts without them giving us the user ID and password.
* While we have at times considered reselling for another registrar, switching would be a considerable disruption to our business and the businesses of our customers. It would not be as easy as you make it out to be for us to simply move onto another registrar.
On point 3:
* Nothing there that I can categorically disagree with. However, as we’ve seen with RegisterFly, this is not something that is confined to resellers.
To address the underlying problem I suggest you start with an acceptance that the reseller model is viable, acceptable, and here to stay. Rather than fighting it, work to improve it for everyone — the customers, the resellers, and the registrars.
I don’t want to go back to the bad old days where I had to register a domain in our name, something I still see other small companies doing all the time, which causes us worse headaches when we are trying to transfer new customers into our company, even if it’s just the hosting and not the domain registration. This is an unofficial reseller situation anyway, and being unofficial causes more problems than would happen under an official reseller arrangement. I also don’t want to go back to apologetically sending a customer to some other company’s Web site to complete the process themselves, or ask them to give me their credit-card information so that I can do the job for them. These situations do not serve the customer well, not to mention the fact that they make doing business difficult for small companies.
There is a place at the table for businesses of all sizes, and if you squeeze out the resellers you squeeze out an important part of the industry. Sure, people won’t stop buying domains if resellers cease to exist, and it concerns me that ICANN may not care about resellers for that very reason. This is why, when Elliot Noss or anyone at Tucows issues a call to action to protect the reseller business model, I will be there asking, “How high do you want me to jump?”
Craig
Craig,
Thanks for your comments. To be clear, we’re not calling for the abolishment of the reseller model. We’ve launched a process to review and revise the Registrar Accreditation Agreement and we’re calling on the community to provide feedback regarding how the RAA should be revised (if at all) to ensure better accountability by resellers to registrants. (See http://blog.icann.org/?p=65 .)
This blog post was intended to help facilitate the discussion with accredited registrars.
Mike,
Appreciate the clarification, and I’m glad to hear that you’re not calling for the abolishment of resellers.
Didn’t realise that this was a forum only for registrars and their representatives, so apologies for missing that, but appreciate your including and addressing my comments.
Craig
A reseller / April 24th, 2007, 5:36 am / #
Reply to this commentAlthough the posting of comments on this blog is generally restricted to only those who “represent” accredited registrars (see http://regbits.info/about/), we’re making an exception for this post to allow resellers to share their perspectives.
Mike Zupke / April 22nd, 2007, 7:19 am / #
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