Re: Transfering a domain

[johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine)]

> It's not a matter of fraud.  You are looking at it only from the
> customer's perspective.  A registrar needs some leverage, as well.
> Suppose that the cause of the dispute is that the customer just
> didn't pay their bill.  The registrar, acting in good faith, keeps
> the domain in DNS, then suddenly finds that it is no longer
> representing the domain -- a registrar in, well, let's see -- some
> remote foreign country now manages it.

That's a legitimate concern, but so is the issue that a sufficiently
screwed up registrar could through malice or sheer ineptness hold all
of their customers' domains hostage.  Imagine a situation where all of
a registrar's technical people quit, leaving the manager and a
secretary, so the registry is alive enough not to provoke the
dead-registry-recovery procedure, yet not able to handle updates from
customers promptly nor accurately, nor to respond to inquiries from
other registrars.

Here's my suggestion: when a customer switches registrars, the new
registrar has to notify the old one.  The old registrar can send the
new registrar a report about the customer to which the new registrar
can pay as much or as little attention as it wants.  This gives
registrars the opportunity to make their case to each other about
misbehaving customers, while not holding customers hostage to bozo
registrars.

If a registrar has a financial issue with a customer, there are plenty
of collection agencies, credit bureaus, and small claims courts
available already.  I don't see that we need to let them hold domains
hostage as well.  Look at our favorite whipping boy, the Internic --
Friday evening I got e-mail saying that one of my domains was about to
be cancelled for non-payment, but I know I faxed in the payment info
in November, and I have been unable to get their fax to answer the
phone during the past three days.  By the time they responded to a
domain change query from another registrar, I would have died from old
age.
-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl@iecc.com, http://iecc.com/johnl, "New witty saying coming soon."