[ga] whats wrong with resellers?

[Danny Younger <dannyyounger@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://regbits.info/2007/04/18/whats-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.

Posted By : Mike Zupke
April 18th, 2007

Danny comment:  For those of you that have been
unaware of this blog, earlier recent articles have
included "Registrar Data Escrow draft specifications"
(with a link to a document that reflects an initial
attempt to specify the schedule, terms, and format
registrars must use to escrow data pursuant to RAA
paragraph 3.6.), "Transfer-Questions gets a ticketing
system", and a RegisterFly update that revealed, among
other problems, that Registerfly?s port 43 and
web-based Whois services were not functioning,
preventing use of FOAs for .com and .net names. 

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