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LOL! That’s the best sarcasm I’ve seen in the comments on any of my articles! Good job. You made me laugh. On another note, I see some of the other blogs are starting to talk about ICANN’s response to registrars who are abusing the 60 day hold system that I accused Godaddy of a week ago. However, the other blogs authors are seemingly CHICKENSH*T about naming names. I’ll name names, because it’s in the best interest of my readers, not my “ad or sponsorship” bottom line.

Godaddy definitely abuses the whois registrant change process to lock down domains. There, I said it. IYD definitely hides or suppresses the ability for people to transfer their domains OUT of their registrar. Domain Monkey — Damn, i don’t even want to mention their name… forget it… Look people. If you want to buy domain names, here’s the few registrars I trust, in no particular order:

Fabulous.com
Enom.com
Bulkregister.com
Moniker.com
Rebel.com

Make some deals with these registrars to get the best prices if you’re buying or transferring at least 300 domain names. The registrars I want to warn you to stay away from (unless they hire me as their domain consultant, whereas I will then become a corporate hack selling out for the $$$ they pay me):

Network Solutions
Go Daddy
Register.com
Tucows.com (Itsyourdomain.com)

And a message to any registrar that is outside this list. If you are a legitimate registrar, you can contact me and invite me to “review” your domain management system. I’ve helped design several registrar systems that are now accepted as mainstream, so if you want to look legit and be legit, I will help you reach that goal. If you can’t afford my services, and you’re not on my “good registrar list” and I experience or hear about shenanigans you’re pulling on domainers, then you shouldn’t be in business handling the precious cargo of domainers. PERIOD. I will go the extra mile to make sure my clients and my readers stay away from your website.

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Hi Jon,

You got a response that quick? Within ten weeks? WOW! You’re getting the best of their customer service. I still have support tickets unanswered from 2007. I’d like to see them recover the few domains I lost to their failure to allow me to transfer the domains out before they expired. Thanks for writing, Jon.

“and we have renewed and acquired names that our resellers’ customers have chosen not to renew.”

Tucows’ domain business is 90%+ reseller businss. So they are indeed guilty of what you are accusing them of.

It’s like they are saying “we own 10 diamond rings and here they are you can look at all of them — it’s ok that half of them are stolen becase the other half were purchased legitimately.

How can he say that what they do is ok because SOME OF THE NAMES were purchased from netdentity and domainers? What about the ones you are keeping that your CUSTOMERS forgot to renew?

Basically he is admitting publicly, if you have a name registered with tucows, and it generates ANY PPC profit during “the longest grace period in the industry”, they are going to just keep it for themselves. ICANN does state that domain names that are not renewed by the registrant need to be released.

This is an unfair business practice and conflict of interests. Time to write to your state attorney generals if you live in a state where these offending registrars conduct business.

“In 2006, Tucows purchased NetIdentity, a business offering email and web addresses for many of the more popular American and European names. Tucows announced today that it has over 150,000 domain names in its private portfolio including 39,000 different surnames, which covers 65 percent of the North American phone book.”

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SD: Message to Readers: For pertinent domain news, please visit http://www.domainnamenews.com

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your comments. It is not very well-known among a lot of domainers that registrars do this (purchase up their customers’ expiring domains). I appreciate you posting the Tucows portfolio source information to correct any mistaken assumptions, which backs up the General Manager at Tucows, Bill Sweetman’s, comments about their policy. (see below)

As the General Manager of the Tucows Domain Portfolio, I’d like to address some of the points you made in your blog post.

We have built up our large portfolio of domains in a number of ways. We have purchased entire portfolios of names owned by other companies (or acquired those companies for the names they own), we have bought individual names from domainers, we have purchased names on the aftermarket (through live and silent auctions), we have registered new names, and we have renewed and acquired names that our resellers’ customers have chosen not to renew.

As an ICANN accredited registrar, I can assure you that we are NOT violating any ICANN rules related to acquiring domain names (or any other rules for that matter). In fact, some of the policies we have put in place are even more fair and registrant-friendly than ICANN’s rules. For instance, we have one of the longest expired domain Grace Periods in the industry: 40 days. We also have a clearly defined set of Expired Domain Redemption guidelines regarding how and when the original registrant of a domain name can get a name reinstated.

We also would never deliberately take or “play” with a customer’s domain, although we will investigate any claim regarding this and do everything possible to resolve the situation.

Regards,

Bill Sweetman
General Manager
Tucows Domain Portfolio

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Hi Bill,

Thanks for the update on this. It sets some particular suspicions at rest, for the most part. Adam’s comment above also backs you up on this, and I usually respect Mr. Strong’s opinion. I was basing my blog on a horrendous experience I had trying to transfer out a client’s (and my) domains from Itsyourdomain.com a few months ago. I never got them. I called and wrote in a complaint and didn’t get a response for six weeks. I lost the domains, and I was told later (via Andrew Allemann’s newsite http://www.domainnamewire.com) that the problem stemmed from IYD never changing the whois info over to the “new customer” default info on the domains I purchased from Snapname auctions last year. That means the domains were in a constant “delete” whois setting based on what IYD set up.

I never had any issue with Tucows before late last year. It was when they bought IYD over six months ago but still hadn’t upgraded it yet — at least not in time for me to get my domains transferred out, so that raised my eyebrows. I figured IYD, with the lack of procedures in place to notify customers and to allow transfers out, was a great source of obtaining expired domain names for Tucows. I’m not sure I’d find my expired IYD domains in your portfolio though, they weren’t that good. LOL

Anyway, I will accept your comments as fact. Good luck with your domain portfolio. It looks like it has a lot of premium domains. Again, thanks for the comments to better represent Tucows’ position.