At 4/1/00 7:07 AM, cfm@maine.com wrote:
>You are supposed to be reselling these domains. Generally speaking,
>that is your business, not theirs. I can't think of any wholesalers
>that accept any responsibility for chargebacks when retailers in the
>chain screw up; that's counter to the whole concept of wholesale.
And sys@zanmai.com wrote:
>Excellent point, and the entire point. Theft/loss/fraud are always parts
>of the cost/model of selling anything retail. It is not the upstream
>supplier's
>responsibility to indemnify any loses the retailer may suffer.
But there's a difference. OpenSRS is NOT a traditional wholesale/retail
arrangement in which we buy something from them, take ownership of it,
then sell it to someone else.
You're suggesting that we work like car dealerships, where we buy a
product from the manufacturer, legally own it ourselves, then sell it. If
that were the case, you'd be absolutely right: I would be the prior owner
of any domain name people bought through me, and therefore I would still
own it if people didn't pay, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
But that's not what happens. Instead, we're selling a product that
OpenSRS has total control over. At no point do we own it or have control
over it.
In fact, we're more like a car financing company than we are like a car
dealership. We pay the whole amount of the transaction for the customer,
who becomes the registered owner, then we count on the fact that we're
going to be able to collect the money (and keep a little extra).
There's one difference: ICANN rules and OpenSRS policies don't give us
the right to repossess if the person doesn't pay. If you buy a car from a
Honda dealership with a loan from Wells Fargo Bank, and you don't pay the
bill, who owns the car? Wells Fargo bank, that's who, and they have the
right to repossess it and sell it to someone else. Do you think banks
would give people the money to buy a car if they didn't have the right to
take ownership from people who don't pay? The system would collapse.
People keep parroting "it's the normal cost of doing business." That's
simply not the case. There are few, if any, businesses where the retailer
accepts the full risk of collecting payment but has absolutely no
ownership or control of the product if the customer refuses to pay.
As it stands with ICANN/OpenSRS, one of my customers can tell his credit
card company he refuses to pay for it, and he still has legal ownership
and use of the thing he won't pay for. Does that sound like the way
business normally works? Of course not. If you claim you never authorized
a charge to buy a mail order television, you don't legally still own it.
(Whether the company that sold you the TV will be able to get it back
from you is another matter, but at least they have the *right* to do so,
because it's theirs, not yours.)
I know these are tough issues that OpenSRS has to deal with, especially
since some of the rules are imposed by ICANN. But a solution like
allowing the reseller to be able to change the password on an account,
effectively repossessing it until the registrant/reseller resolve the
issue, would solve the problem.
It sounds like this is what Domain Direct does, and I'd like to
respectfully request that OpenSRS consider giving resellers the same
power.
-- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:35:28 EDT