You said “If Tucows has nothing to hide, I do not see the reason for the Contact Privacy on the Tucows “owned” domains.”

Point taken.

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 our resellers to add Contact Privacy to all domain names by default – in fact we offer Contact Privacy to 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 and they didn’t give any thought that it might raise cause people to question our integrity 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.

Adam from Afternic already offered an apology for the confusion that our auction’s teething pains have caused, but I wanted to extend a personal apology as well.

I’d like to reiterate that because Afternic caught the mistake before any names left Pre-bid, NO names were removed from the auction after bidding started. Therefore I guess the greatest concern about possible impropriety on our part is with names that got Pre-bids and were subsequently withdrawn. One of the four names you mentioned (fagm.com) falls into that category. The other three were listed but had not received any Pre-bids so we gained no “market knowledge” by listing them.

The incorrectly listed Tucows names that had Pre-bids in the last few days were fagm.com, adwrap.com, storeaway.com, 8xp.com. To show that we’re not up to something nefarious I’m going to ask the team to resubmit these to the auction next week.

I also wanted to point out that seeing contactprivacy.com and/or mdnsservice.com in the WHOIS doesn’t mean the name is OWNED by Tucows. It means it is protected by our WHOIS Privacy Service and it could be owned by any of the millions of registrants using our service. Nameservers like parking1.mdnsservice.com tell you the name is parked with us, but once again, it could be a Tucows’ owned name or it could be a registrant’s name that is in our Parking Service.

Therefore it is possible that a non-Tucows domain expires, is listed for Pre-bids on Afternic, then withdrawn when it is renewed with WHOIS Privacy and parked on our Parking Service. That’s a perfectly legitimate situation. It will LOOK exactly like the examples you’ve shown here though – hence my caveat not to assume the names are always owned by Tucows when you see this kind of situation.

Once again – sorry for all the confusion!

Cheers,

Ken.

**Jamie Says**
Thank you for posting Ken. Although I do not agree with most of your answer I do think the right thing is to talk publicly about it, which Tucows does.

The “could” stuff doesn’t fly with me and I’m sure most others, because I “could” be the president of the United States Of America as well. If Tucows has nothing to hide, I do not see the reason for the Contact Privacy on the Tucows “owned” domains.

The most common pattern for Tucows owned (wharehoused, stolen, kept, moved or how ever anybody wants to put it) domains is Contact Privacy and the servers of parking1.mdnsservice.com . It does appear in the past that Many Tucows owned domains were won at auction and then Tucows reclaimed the domains. TheDomains.com is one of the bigger buyers and has expressed his feelings. I also ran across two more threads on DnFourm.com that the bidders Won the domains and didn’t get them. I do not know the domains, so I can not say they were or were not Tucows domains..
http://www.dnforum.com/f31/tucows-again-thread-310722.html

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