[BALUG-Admin] Gandi wins (was: So, joker.com, then?)

[Rick Moen]

While I'm at it, there's another criterion for a good vs. bad registrar: 
Ability to end the business relationship at the customer's request,
promptly.  About which more to follow.


When I rescued Cheryl Morris, my dementia-impaired mother-in-law, from
the clutches of "Register.com" (the same Web.com pirates in Florida who
now own NetSol), several of their crooked measures offended me so
thoroughly* that I was determined to leave it _extremely_ clear, after I
migrated her one needed domain elsewhere, that Ms. Morris was
permanently ending all business dealings and required:

1.  That Register.com delete all records of her credit card.
2.  That Register.com delete all personal information.
3.  That Register.com cease all contact.

_And_, what really made me see red was:  Register.com's customer Web
site had no facility whatsoever for closing an account.  Inquiring
revealed that anyone _wishing_ to close an account cannot do that via
the Web site, or even _initiate_ that via the Web site, but must call
the Support telephone line during Florida business hours.

I called Support.  I was terse but carefully polite to the agent, who 
after all had done nothing wrong personally, but just was working for
crooks.  I'm sure he was aware that I was boiling mad, despite my calm
and polite wording.

He kept offering me half-a-loaf, along the lines of "the account will
remain until [blah]", and I kept coming back with "No, Ms. Morris
adamantly requires, not requests, that all business relations cease
permanently and completely, today, now, as of this telephone call.  As
of right now, you are officially notified that Ms. Morris is not a
Register.com customer, that your firm has zero existing business
relationship with her, and that any further contact will be consider to
be harassment and may bring legal consequences."

After a few rounds of this, he gave a half-hearted promise of no further
contact.  This of course was not true:  Cheryl received a number of
other automated attempts to sucker her into re-upping.


Anyway, my point is this:  A truly good customer should have a
well-documented, easy to find process for closing the customer account.

Surprise:  IWantMyName's documentation about "close account" is better
than Gandi's.  IWantMyName has a _relatively_ easy to locate document
that explains you can request closure by contacting Support, but that 
the company must then follow-up, which is reasonable, I guess.

By contrast, Gandi doesn't properly address the matter.  I did find a
similar statement hidden much worse than the other guys did.


* I can't even remember _all_ of the outrages, but it starts with
Cheryl, in mental decline, having been unable to resist pushing default
buttons waved in front of her on Web pages.  Consequently, Register.com 
had succeeded in selling her numerous other domains for which she had no
use and also no DNS or content.  Also, they had succeeded in selling her
wildly overexpense SSL services redundant to the Let's Encrypt certs
Deirdre enabled on her Web site.  Also, they had succeeded in selling
her a number of other totally useless "proection" pseudo-services.
All of thise was costing her a large amount of money on an ongoing
basis.  Moreover, some of these value-add services were hidden on
obscure sub-pages of the customer Web site, such that, after I thought
I'd terminated all the unwanted monthly services, I waited a month and
then saw that there were _still_ junk charges to her credit card, and
then had to find where _else_ on the customer Web site to find and
disable those.

Cheryl had gotten herself deep into orders of this-and-that pointless
goods and services, not just at Register.com but also many other places
-- always with autorenew enabled.  Getting her out of the deep hole 
she was in required that Deirdre and I get her through personal 
bankruptcy, and eventually to, with regret, take away all of her 
means of spending money on the Internet.