It’s difficult to make recommendations like this, because it’s a recommendation against two very big and rich (although not respected) companies, but I’ve dealt with both for over thirty years, and I think that gives me some significant say in the matter. I made the same recommendation for dot-zm domains sometime ago, and I had very good reasons then, but once we were accepted into the very elite club of domain registrars, we rescinded our recommendation, and now we strongly recommend that you register your dot-zm domains through Preworx, the best and only sane registrar in Zambia.
I’ve had problems with CIRA since about 1 December 2000 (which you’ll recognise as the day they took over dot-ca from John Demco and UBC), and that includes saying one thing and doing another. Some of them are documented (Dot-ca domain registry changes, 12 October 2010), and some I’d have to piece together almost three decades later from documentation I still have on my machine, or can piece together from data I will eventually recover from my back-up provider.
My issue today was that I eventually gave up on waiting for them to reply to an email. I opened a support ticket in the new usual manner at OpenSRS/Tucows — NinerNet’s domain registrar — on 5 June 2026. On 10 June — only five days later — I received my one and only reply from them, asking for a PIN that I could view in my control panel. Sure, no problem, I’ll get that for you. I got it and sent it to them, expecting (after five days) that I’d get an immediate response on the fast-as-the-speed-of-light communication medium that email is, and we’d have my issue sorted out within five minutes. But … nothing. Here I am twenty days later (that’s almost three weeks), and nobody has checked to see if my PIN is correct.
So several days later, on 16 June, after warning OpenSRS/Tucows, that I would do so, I eventually opened another support ticket, this time with CIRA. I eventually, on 19 June (only three days later) received again my one and only reply, to ask for information that I had already given them in the contact form. I replied with that information, and the suggestion that if they ask for information on a contact form, it makes sense for them to use it. Crickets.
So after being kept in suspense by both OpenSRS/Tucows and CIRA for a combined total of 30 days, today I did that radical thing called picking up the phone. After listening to recorded BS for two full minutes, I eventually started talking to Gerard, who apparently has never heard of courtesy and went silent while he was doing stuff instead of being polite enough to say, “One moment, please, while I look up some information.” That very quickly lead to us getting our wires crossed, him talking over me, then me talking over him, then him sarcastically requesting that I let him finish, even though his solution to my problem was to contact the registrar, even though their ignoring me was the very reason I was contact the registry! Eventually he managed to get out that I just need to be patient (!) and wait for their email. So absolutely no solution from the registry, as I still haven’t heard from them the next day. I guess they’re blacklisted.
So in frustration, after that ten-minute phone call, I went back to my OpenSRS/Tucows control panel to try something. The records for two of my domains had, somehow, turned from “records” that stated the data associated with those domains and their status, into “drafts”. That was precisely why I had contacted OpenSRS/Tucows, to get them to explain to me why, and to turn them back into “records” I could work with. What I eventually noticed, is that when I have a “draft” open, the whole screen acts as a sort of modal window/dialogue, and besides the relatively obvious save/submit button(s) in the bottom, right hand corner, there is a “delete draft” link in the bottom, left hand corner! Actually, I did notice this before, but this lead me to contact OpenSRS/Tucows to ask my easily answerable question, because I was concerned that if I deleted my draft I might be deleting the domain too, which was definitely not what I wanted to do!
At my wits’ end now, I decided to throw caution to the wind and click the “delete draft” link. Right away I had the answer to my question: I was not deleting the domain, but just whatever work I had performed a few weeks ago. (I don’t even remember what it was; I don’t care any more.) So now I could do whatever I wanted with the domain, and I renewed it. And then I immediately noted the domain’s “auth code”, and I transferred it to a new registrar. And then I deleted the draft of a second domain, and immediately transferred it as well. There is just no reason for me to stay with OpenSRS/Tucows any more.
That leaves me with 21 domains in my account, which I will transfer out piecemeal over the next few months as they come up for renewal. The vast majority of my domains are elsewhere, but that registrar (RRPproxy) is on borrowed time too.
I did make one mistake; transferring one domain out so soon after I renewed it meant that, although I paid for a year’s renewal at my new registrar, I didn’t get that renewal. I should have known that, as I have encountered this little wrinkle in the domain process before, despite how infuriating it must be to be surprised by this for the first time. No big deal though; whatever it cost me to get away from OpenSRS/Tucows, it was worth it.
Tucows used to be not just a good company; they were an excellent company, and I say that about precious few companies these days. They got the domain business; that’s how they’re the fourth biggest domain registrar in the world. They used to be the third though (and I think the second before that), and with the way they’re going, they’ll be the 33rd next week and then the 133rd the week after that. Elliot Noss specifically got the domain business, but OpenSRS/Tucows seems to have been taken over for quite a few years by bean counters who don’t get the domain business. Before the bean counters came along, OpenSRS was a leader in our business. They held ICANN’s feet to the fire, and they were responsible for so much good in ICANN. And now they’re coasting. I used to be able to whip up a quick email to a particular email address (you know the one), go to bed, and know without fail that I’d have an answer, and maybe even a resolution, in the morning. But no more. They improved their support by requiring us to use a form, and they think that three weeks (and counting) is just fine to wait for them to get up off their fat asses to reply.
OpenSRS joked (when they still had a sense of humour) that the eighties called, and they wanted their control panel back. We’re now almost in the 2030s and the eighties still want their control panel back. That control panel I described earlier is still only half done, and I still have to use the eighties version to get some stuff done. It’s 2026 and it’s not a joke any more.
- Elliot, your control panel is a joke.
- Your support is a joke.
- There are kids today who don’t even realise that you’re responsible for much of the good in ICANN.
- I’ve lost patience with you.
- I’m done.
As for CIRA, they’re not even worth wasting any ink over. If CIRA, who go on about being a “member-based” organisation as if it actually meant they cared about their members, went out of business today, nobody would notice, but if OpenSRS/Tucows went out of business today, everyone would notice.
