I'm also wondering whether we could also try to understand whether registrars have contractual relationships with their resellers (eg a formal reselling program) or, in general, if and how could you pass on to resellers some information / best practices / contractual clauses. But perhaps that would lead us too far?
That's an interesting question, but one that might better be separated from the transfer question. Transfer policies can be categorized pretty easily along a few axes, e.g., automatic vs. manual, free vs. pay at verious price levels, and it will be useful and interesting to find out how registrars fall into those categories. I'm a Tucows reseller, and they have contracts I had to sign and fax back. They're online at http://resellers.tucows.com/contracts/. Poking around at a few other resellers, I find either print and sign or clickwrap contracts. But even if I collected them all, I'm not sure what I'd do with them. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.