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By Ken Schafer - Tucows on Nov 13, 2008

Hi Stephen,

You stated “This means, I’ve never seen any registrar, besides Tucows, throw a previous domain owner under the bus if they failed to renew a domain and then requested it back, even AFTER the RGP period.”

I’m not sure why you have this impression but Tucows has one of – if not the – longest expiration periods in the industry and we regularly as a matter of course revert names to owners that let them expire LONG after that period ends if we have any way of doing so.

If you have a specific example of a registrant who couldn’t get a name back from us after expiration, drop me an email and I’ll be happy to investigate the situation and try to correct it if possible.

XXXXXX Stephen Douglas Responds:

Hi Ken,

Thanks for your response. All you need to do is to search back through my archives where my first problem with Tucows actually rose from your purchase of ItsYourDomain.com. (IYD). This company, with approximately 500,000 registrations, was selling expired domains through Snapnames, and I purchased a few. However, against Snapname regulations and TOS with registrars, IYD never changed the whois ownership over to me. It just kept the whois info as “expired” or whatever (too bored to go search back on what I discovered, thanks to Andrew Allemann of DomainNewsWire.com investigation).

The problem was that my domain name was listed as “expired” on my whois registration six weeks before the domain was expired. I checked about four other domains purchased from IYD, and the same whois listing appeared. The domains I purchased through Snapnames, submitted by IYD, never had the whois registration changed to reflect my ownership. Bill Sweetman helped me recover one of the domains, but I lost the other two, which cost me about $138 in purchases from Snapnames.

Since I charge $100 an hour for my services, I didn’t bother wasting my time trying to recover the domains. I did this once already with GoDaddy, another behemoth registrar that cares more about T&A than serious domain investor relations. Tucows, I never used them, but when I get clients who try to transfer their domains out of Tucows and run into bloated processing and horrible GUI layouts, all I can do is warn my other clients not to use Tucows.

Ken, you seem like a nice guy, and Tucows may really care about the domainer community. But it’s hard to see that when Tucows never supports domain conferences, you don’t appear at any of them, no advertising nor involvement with you with the very people who invest in the most domains. You’re at the consumer level like GoDaddy, but without the phony “I want to be Larry Flynt” commercials during the Super Bowl. However, your game is kinda like flying under the radar of prodomainers who can see what you’re really doing.

When Tucows and GoDaddy start pumping money into the domain industry to support building a legitimate business image for domainers, I’ll be talking a different story. But for now, all I see is a cash cow for both GoDaddy and Tucows, taking advantage of noobies by offering jump-off pricing, but using “how the hell do I get out of this maze” domain management pages.

I designed the “magic folders” concept and other domainer-friendly features for Bulkregister, along with Eric Rice, back in 2005. This features were incorporated and copied by many other registrars, including GoDaddy, and Enom when they bought Bulkregister in 2006. I know what domainers need, and I can spot instantly whether a registrar cares about this industry, other than just raking in cash from people who have no clue and who bite on massive upsell during a domain registration.

I’d be more impressed if Tucows would reimburse me my $138 I spent buying two domains on Snapnames that were lost by IYD because they never updated my whois info so I could renew the domains. If that doesn’t happen, then my interest in Tucows is at the level of my interest in collecting South American jungle vine seeds.

By Michael Berkens on Nov 13, 2008

Thanks for the props

I agree with you and I have been saying for a while the only answer to this problem is to adopt a process similar to the old WLS system in which there is like you say, one central place where everyone has to go to backorder a domain. One backorder per domain and if it drops the backorder holder gets it.

All domains have to drop in such fashion.

No auctions, no scripting, no registrar hoarding.

The question does remain who is going to run the service and where the money will go.

But domainers should push for such a system as the alternatives as we have seen as substantially worse

By RegFeeNames.com on Nov 13, 2008

They are stealing these names 100% and making profit from us!

Thanks to Mike for putting alot of spotlight on this – I say we boycott all the parties involved and they wont be able to operate in this way no more!

Regards,

Robbie
Founder
RegFeeNames.com