Robert F. Connelly wrote:
At 01:14 AM 6/9/04, Thomas Keller wrote:
I guess the point Paul was trying to make was that the complains to ICANN are not related to the amount of registrations a registrar has.
Dear Thomas: I totally reject your thesis. I'm traveling and less able to write my reasons.
I reject also. So let me give it a try for you as to why: It defies common sense. It also defies common sense that a reseller network is not going to create more potential complaints. In theory of course. I don't have ICANN data to back this up but I do have personal experience with this. I can tell you that we get 3 to 6 complaints a day regarding a certain reseller for a registrar (that has a name similar to our name) that seems to have a problem refunding money to customers when a registrar transfer fails. It's always the same story. I can just imagine the amount of times that this happens where we don't get the complaints. I would imagine the reason ICANN doesn't get more complaints is that many end users don't know how to contact ICANN or even the existence of ICANN. After all, when I have a complaint with the phone company it's not like I take the time to complain to anyone other than the phone company. Back to statistics. Of course there are mitigating factors. For example, a large domain buyer, like buydomains.com might own 200,000 domains which go through one or a few registrar. In a situation like that there is likely to be no complaints to ICANN for that 200k block of names. On the other hand a single large reseller with 200k names at a single or multiple registrars or multiple resellers would most likely cause complaints in ratio to the amount of names registered. I've noticed that some of the large registrars have instituted reseller programs where they do everything for a reseller, put up the site take the orders, pretty much everything. They sell you the names for a low price and encourage you to mark up the names for a few dollars. They don't require anything, as far as I can tell, in terms of making sure that those resellers provide support the registrants of the low priced domains etc. Larry Erlich
OTOH, I am raising a demand that ICANN quantify their allegation. If ICANN is doing work for which we must pay and it is related to registrar malfeasance, we should be provided with a list of the culprits and the number of cases thereto related;-)
This is supposed to be an open society.
Cordially, BobC
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