There is a discussion going on internally regarding the ISP's
access to the registrant's records... I appreciate the input
so far.
The strongest argument is clearly that under most circumstances,
the ISP will be able to serve his client better if he has immediate
access to the records. Another well-received comment from my
perspective is the ability for ISP's to regulate who assigns
domains to the ISP nameservers... this has bugged me forever as
folks circumvent your registration fee and indicate your
nameservers in the registration... much less of a problem with the
pre-payment requirement nowadays but it is still there. I don't
know how much weight this arg will carry because it is still
possible to do everywhere else and even within the OpenSRS system
when registered through a different reseller... the client can
still assign nameservers of one reseller when registered through
another (though, why would they?).
Although I see valid points as described above, I am also very-much
a customer advocate and believe that there are a few ISPs who would
cause probs for folks who indicate that they want to leave... what
to do. We have the ability to revoke OpenSRS access to any ISP who
abuses their power but clients may not know to notify Tucows when
this happens.
We're toying with different options such as restricted access,
perhaps just to the nameserver records or even full access which is
revokable upon notice that an ISP is abusing their power (this is
tricky because clients have a tendency to over dramatize how bad
their experience might have been with an ISP).
One final thing, we know that ISPs *can* use hidden variables,
tweak the client and always assign themselves as the authoritative
user for every domain they process. So we're keeping this in mind
during the decision-making process. What we want is the best
solution with the least negative impact as there is no perfect
solution.
-tom
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:35:16 EDT