According to a post in Dot Weekly Tucows is still pulling domains from the Afternic Platform.
I will not relay our dealings with Tucows in their in-house auctions again (you can read all the posts herein) but basically they took back 260 domains they sold at auction, after they sold, saying that it was a mistake those domains we placed into the auction.
When the Tucows expired domain auction moved to Afternic Dot Weekly reported that several domains again were pulled from the auction blaming it on a mistake.
In today’s report by Dot Weekly, even more names have been taken off the Afternic Platform, domains again owned by Tucows.
So lets see.
When they took back domains they owned on their from their own auction platform they said it was a mistake.
When they took back domains they owned, at the beginning of the Afternic auction platform migration, they said it was a mistake
Now I guess they are making more mistakes
Unless as I warned, maybe they are not making mistakes but using these auctions as a gauge to decide what domains to keep. In the in-house auction, if the price a domains sold for was under expectations they could pull them back and say “sorry we made a mistake”. If the auction price was high enough the sale would go though.
Now If they get too many backorders on a domain, maybe they decide it’s a domain they should keep and then pull it out of the auction.
I mean how long is this “we made a mistake” excuse going to fly with everyone??
Registrars should not be allowed to own a domain portfolio. Clear conflict of interest. I wish that ICANN would make a ruling prohibiting this. Either be a registrar or a domainer; not both. I won’t deal with Tucows.
Philip
They are allowed to do it.
Have you posted your comments on ICANN’s site.
Good luck to anyone in getting a useful reply from Tucows. I have been trying to figure out about a missing domain for weeks and just keep getting the runaround. I won the auction, paid for it, a few weeks later it disappeared from winning list, no emails from tucows, no refund, and the DNS shows MDNSSERVICE.COM.
It’s a situation where you say “I’ll take my business elsewhere”, but the reality is if you want a particular domain there is no choice.
Do keep up the good work on keeping the industry in check!
Terrell
Who is the owner of the domain??
Does it have Tucows privacy on it?
Yes. It has contactprivacy.com is on the current WhoIs. The name expired April 1 and the last DT Whois (1/31/8) also shows contactprivacy.
It’s a brand name with no backlinks that I was going to pick up for a client, rather than a keyword or traffic name, so I was surprised something fishy was going on.
Terrell
Its one of the 260 domains that Tucows owned and pulled back after the auction ended.
They should have sent you a notice and refunded your money.
Adam from NameMedia here. As discussed, there were technical issues in Afternic’s implementation that occurred. The result was that Afternic was not updating the mutual inventory as frequently as it should have, so Afternic made names available for preorder that should not have been.
We apologize for these issues, and for any time that hasn’t been spent well on our site. We have now resolved the issue which prevented Afternic from updating every day.
NameMedia highly values our partnership with Tucows; they are an outstanding company to work with.
Again, we are very sorry for inconveniences. We’re confident that our service will deliver for the entire community.
Thanks,
Adam Gross
Adam
Just trying to understand what is going on.
I personally have not followed Tucows names since they migrated to Afternic.
Due to problems which I have address previously with Tucows, I promised that I would never bid in or on another Tucows drop auction.
However dot weekly seems to have followed the Tucows domains on Afternic from the beginning which I believe is not over a month ago.
At the beginning we heard from dot weekly that there were names that had been placed on the Afternic platform, which were Tucows owned, which we latter taken off.
At that time the response was this was loaded by Afternic by mistake and it would not happen again.
But according to Dot Weekly this is still happening.
Errors cannot be continuous made. At some point the database has to be cleaned up and the names that are on are the ones that are on. Otherwise all sorts of games can be played.
Mistakes can only happen for so long.
It all starts with warehousing.
If we really want to fix these problems we need to make sure warehousing is prohibited.
I wont be surprised if at list some of these names were expired names by Tucows clients.
The problem is, that many registrars do it, and they wont stop unless forced by ICANN.
Also,
do you know how long it takes for ICANN to publish our emails? I sent one few days ago and it is not up yet…
Yaron
All of these names that Tucows now owns we’re owned at one time by one of their clients.
Once you send the e-mail to ICANN to post on the site they send you a verification e-mail before they post the comment, so check your junk mail to see if its there.
We received our e-mail verification within an hour of sending the e-mail, so if its been days then you may have to resend the e-mail and look for the verification e-mail from ICANN
Let’s see… on June 22nd, Bill Sweetman himself stated this;
“Unfortunately, there was a technical error that led to some names (a small percentage of the original set) being listed in the Afternic marketplace that should not have been listed. These names were later removed from the marketplace, and the error that caused them to be listed in the first place has been corrected.”
Now, isn’t it pretty clear that he is claiming that the issues has been resolved, as in fixed, can’t happen again, etc…?
This was over 2 weeks ago.
So why is it STILL happening, Bill?
Thanks!
it was in my junk email….
I think warehousing is the biggest problem in this industry, and as long as it is not prohibited there is nothing we can really do…
I mean, ICANN doesn’t really care (so far)
ICA doesn’t care.
this is the biggest fraud in this industry, and one day iyt will explode in our face…
All:
My name is Pete Lamson, I oversee all NameMedia Marketplace businesses, including Afternic.
My post is to clarify a few issues surrounding the recent dialogue on Afternic Expiry Auctions.
1. Due to a complicated integration initiative between Afternic and Tucows, there were unforeseen technical problems with the uploading of Tucows Daily Expiry. These problems surfaced immediately following launch several weeks ago. Regrettably, the resolution of these complex problems was not fully completed until today. The technology problems were due to Afternic infrastructure and were unrelated to Tucows. It is our expectation that these challenges are now behind us.
2. There never was (or will be) any plan for Afternic or Tucuws to pull back names where there has been a market driven indication of interest.
Although there has been considerable speculation on this point, I can assure you that pulling back names due to perceived or proven market interest is simply not happening.
3. No auction winners have had the name they won at auction pulled back by Tucows or Afternic, despite forum/blog comments to the contrary.
All names erroneously listed were retrieved during the Expiry Auction “Pre-Bid” period, with the exception of two names that had auctions started, but never completed.
This comment is not in any way intended to make light of the fact that names were unfortunately pulled back from the pre-bid period. That said, there was not a single “Auction Winner” who has had their name pulled back after winning an expiry auction.
I believe our integration challenges are now behind us as of this afternoon.
I am happy to discuss this issue further at any time , and can be reached via my direct dial at 781 839 2812.
Best Regards,
Pete Lamson
Pete
So to summarize, all of Tucows domains that we’re loaded into Afternic in error have now been cleared out and domainers can be assured that domains placed into auction at Afternic by Tucows from this point forward will not be pulled out any longer?
Scummy folks, IMO.
The question that begs an answer….
Why does a Registrar not renew their own names before expiry anyway?
Wouldn’t that simple task have kept this fiasco from happening from the get go?
If this is the “mistake” that Tucows made… just how many of the names were taken from registrants by making the same “mistake” with those renewals in the first place?
Pete, when you make a definitive statement like #3 above:
“3. No auction winners have had the name they won at auction pulled back by Tucows or Afternic, despite forum/blog comments to the contrary.”
You completely contradict what Mike stated, quite succinctly, well over 2 weeks ago:
“On Thursday we received notice from Tucows that 23 domains that we had won at their auction had been redeemed by their owner.”
Enough of the Damage Control PR spin, Pete. I know Mike doesn’t overstate things. Not saying you intentionally have, I do know both of you, but in your zealousness to calm the waters I think you may have missed out on some facts that went down right before Afternic was a party to this. Exactly what you deny having happened… well… it did.
Just my read on it, anyway.
Michael:
Your question is very fair.
This answer is yes, with two normal expiry auction caveats.
The exceptions are as follows:
1. Original Registrant renewal during the pre bid period (as is the case with other expiry auctions). The prebid period takes place during a Registrants’ domain renewal “grace period”. If a name is renewed during the grace period, it is returned to the original registrant. Our expectation is that this instance will occur for roughly 2% to 3% of the names in the Afternic Expiry pre-bid period.
2. If a name is the subject of a legal proceeding Afternic may be required to halt a pre-bid or auction.
Lastly, and to reiterate a point from my previous point, during our technical integration problems not a single Afternic auction winner has had a name pulled. This is not spin, it is fact.
As of today we believe our Tucows integration challenges are behind us.
All the best, and please do not hesitate to contact me at 781 839 2812 should anyone wish to discuss this matter further.
Pete Lamson
@Cartoonz @19:
You said, “Why does a Registrar not renew their own names before expiry anyway? Wouldn’t that simple task have kept this fiasco from happening from the get go?”
You nailed it. That was the gap in our process. Before we put names into Afternic’s auction we would occasionally let OUR names expire and renew them during the grace period. This didn’t matter before we started moving names to Afternic but (obviously) messes things up now. We’ve now put new processes in place to always renew our names BEFORE expiry AND we’ve added code to the system to suppress any name data about Tucows names from being sent to Afternic via the automated procedures that caused this problem.
You also said, “If this is the “mistake” that Tucows made… just how many of the names were taken from registrants by making the same “mistake” with those renewals in the first place?”
Not sure I follow you there. It’s up to the registrant to decide to renew their domain and we do exactly what they want.
Finally, you said to Pete Lamson, “You completely contradict what Mike stated, quite succinctly, well over 2 weeks ago”.
The problem that Mike had was with the now defunct Tucows auction and happened before we started listing names on Afternic so from Pete’s perspective the statement is accurate.
We’re really sorry we screwed up right before shutting down the Tucows Auction and we’re really sorry that there were a few glitches in the system when we started auctioning names via Afternic. The problems weren’t related and weren’t part of a grand scheme – just a few human errors getting stacked up a little too close to each other leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.
A lot of people seem to be assuming that seeing contactprivacy.com or mdnsservice.com in WHOIS means that the domain is not only registered via Tucows but actually owned by Tucows. That is not the case.
When you see contactprivacy.com it means the domain is protected by our WHOIS privacy service. I could be any one of the millions of registrants using our service.
Similarly, mdnsservice.com is our normal DNS server. Parked nams are at sub-domains of that DNS, but even there you can’t assume the name is owned by us as it may just be parked on our Parking Service.
Hope that helps clear up some of the confusion.
Interesting post – reading the post and response is like playing a tennis game (the ball – problem) gets thrown from one side of the court (domain name owners) to the other side of the court (Tucows and Afternic) and the referee (ICANN) is asleep.
If Tucows owns the name, why bother with WHOIS privacy at all – since there is nothing wrong with the whole arrangement?
Does a public company really need the “plausible deniability” afforded by the identity shield?
@Cartoonz @25:
You said “If Tucows owns the name, why bother with WHOIS privacy at all”
Point taken.
I just replied to a similar question over at DotWeekly, so I’ll offer the same response here as well…
The decision to apply Contact Privacy to our names pre-dates me by quite a bit so I’ll need to dig into the facts when folks are back in the office next week, but here are a few reasons why I think we made this decision:
1. We think ALL names should have WHOIS Privacy. We encourage people to add Contact Privacy to all domain names by default – in fact we offer Contact Privacy to our resellers for free to allow more people to protect their privacy online. So it’s part of our culture that Contact Privacy is a natural state for a domain.
2. Because we own over 100,000 names, if we made a real email address widely viewable via WHOIS it would get overwhelmed by spam VERY quickly making it useless for anyone legitimately wanting to contact us.
3. Someone added it because they could without any thought that it might raise questions about our intent years later. 🙂
In any case, I’ll talk to the team next week and we’ll take a fresh look at this to see if we can get greater transparency around Tucows vs. non-Tucows names.
Cheers,
Ken.
Ken
This is what dot weekly published today. Once again to be clear I am out of the Tucows/Afternic deal so I am not following them, but they certainly are and you are here answering questions, so I will just republish what they wrote today and see what you have to say:
With all the mistakes and errors happening with the newer Tucows/Afternic partnership for selling the registrar’s Tucows EXPIRED domain names, the following must be some kind of “error”?
These domain names are currently at auction on Afternic and have bids. ERDY.com which expired 5-29-2008. The current whois shows the expired date as 5-29-2009 because expired domain names get AutoRenewed but are still considered expired. So once the expired domain auction ends the domain should be awarded to the highest bidder. MrCoffeeBean.com is also currently in expired auction and that domain shows an expired date of 5-28-2008(9) and Oserinia.com as well with an expired date according to whois as 5-27-2008(9).
So we see a pattern… The active auctions currently are in the same time frame with the Expired Date. Afternic also offers what is called “Pre-Bidding”. The pre-bidding process seems to last for a pretty long time as the Expired Domain Baecscp.com which expired 7-7-2008 (autorenewed to 2009) is listed on Afternic… Well it let me add it to My Alerts watch list anyway, but the listing page is a Uoffer page. Same thing with BedFace.com (6-27), Jait.com (7-5) and more.
Now domains like BetACot.com (expired 6-12-2008) show the listing page and has an auction start date of 7-23-2008. When you visit the domain it says it’s Expired and would make sense why it’s at an expired auction. NotAMan.com expired 6-16-2008 and is listed on Afternic with a auction start date of 7-27-2008. OnMyDay.com expired 6-20-2008 and is listed on Afternic with a auction start date of 7-30-2008.
IPBN.com expired 6-11-2008 and the listing can not be found on Afternic? Hmmm Sags.org expired 6-12-2008 and can not be found on afternic? WLF.com expired 6-19-2008 and can not be found on Afternic? X4M.com expired 6-19-2008 and can not be found on Afternic? Hmmm When I visit the sites they show right on the top that they are Expired? They have the same expired date range as BetACot.com, NotAMan.com and OnMyDaty.com? Why wouldn’t IPBN.com, Sags.org, WLF.com and X4M.com not be listed?
I searched for PF6.com, PF9.com, LADA.com, NAJO.com and PBRN.com and ZERO showed up on Afternic either. These domain had expired dates in the range of 6-21-2008 to 6-24-2008 and all the domains showed the domain was expired when I went to the sites. Why don’t these 9 domains show up?
I didn’t have time to go through the 70,000 plus expired domains but I think you know where I am going here…..
Hi Mike,
Apologies for the lengthy comment, but you DID ask! 🙂
I just posted this to DotWeekly and since you reposted their question here, I’ll take the liberty of putting the full response here as well…
First let me outline the life-cycle of an expiring domain at Tucows and how it relates to the Afternic Auction:
Day 0 – Domain name expires. Original Registrant can renew domain at any time.
Day 3 – Domain parking enabled, parked page header might contain message indicating domain is expired (parking and header message are applied at the discretion of Tucows Resellers). Original Registrant can renew domain at any time.
Day 21 – Domain listed in Afternic marketplace where domain can receive PreOrders. Exceptions: names that have been renewed by Original Registrant, names that Afternic doesn’t want to list on its site (e.g., adult, trademark, vice names), names that Tucows has selected for its Portfolio. Original Registrant can renew domain at any time causing name to be removed from Afternic.
Day 26 – Domain parked page header changes to a specific auction message (unless Tucows Reseller has configured this differently), WHOIS info now includes auction message as well. Original Registrant can renew domain at any time causing name to be removed from Afternic.
Day 38 – Last day that Afternic accepts PreOrders on marketplace names. Original Registrant can renew domain at any time causing name to be removed from Afternic.
Day 40 – Last day that Original Registrant can renew domain, causing name to be removed from Afternic.
Day 41 – Start of 5-Day Live Auction (only for domains that had at least one PreOrder on them at the end of Day 38).
Day 46 – End of 5-Day Live Auction.
With that as background, let’s look at the specific names you mentioned and where they fit in the life-cycle:
Baecscp.com – expired 7-7-2008 – not on Afternic yet (< 21 days)
Jait.com – expired 7-5-2008 – not on Afternic yet (< 21 days)
BedFace.com – expired 6-27-2008 – not on Afternic yet ( 21 days)
X4M.com – expired 6-19-2008 – not on Afternic, chosen for Tucows Portfolio, Original Registrant can renew
WLF.com – expired 6-19-2008 – not on Afternic, chosen for Tucows Portfolio, Original Registrant can renew
NotAMan.com – expired 6-16-2008 – on Afternic as PreOrder (> 21 days)
Sags.org – expired 6-12-2008 – not on Afternic, chosen for Tucows Portfolio, Original Registrant can renew
IPBN.com – expired 6-11-2008 – not on Afternic, chosen for Tucows Portfolio, Original Registrant can renew
BetACot.com – expired 6-12-2008 – on Afternic as PreOrder (> 21 days)
ERDY.com – expired 5-29-2008 – currently in Live Auction (> 40 days)
MrCoffeeBean.com – expired 5-28-2008 – not on Afternic, renewed by Original Registrant prior to entering Live Auction
Oserinia.com – expired 5-27-2008 – currently in Live Auction (> 40 days)
I think that provides a pretty clear (albeit complicated) explanation of the data you’re seeing. I know you don’t like that we’re allowed to select expiring names for the Tucows Portfolio rather than letting them all go to auction or drop but that seems to be something we have to agree to disagree about.
Cheers,
Ken.
this is all BS anyway – registrars should not be warehousing. i dont care if they pull the name back after it is in pre-bid. they are pulling them all back before releasing the garbage to afternic
Ken – Why is no one at Tucows actually telling me why a name I won and paid for dissappeared from my account several weeks after it was paid for? I have contacted every email I had at Tucows but either get ignored or directed elsewhere? I am just looking for an answer.
@Terrell @30
Send me details and I’ll look into it for you. kschafer (at) tucows (dot) com
Terrell
Let us know what answer you get.
Namemedia and Tucows — both full of crap and dishonest companies. Do not deal with them.
MHB
The domain ended up being a name that was “accidentally” listed. It was removed from my auction account several weeks later with no refund. I was able to get an explanation and and the $60 refund through Ken.
Thanks for providing the platform for me to get an answer. I am not sure what I would have done otherwise.
Terrel
Your welcome.