Dear Sir / Madam,
Last night I discovered you have pulled the plug on deleting.co.uk. The result of this will be vast, domain name registrations will drop meaning less revenue for Nominet, less income via transfer of domains, less income for registrars and yes you're putting out the entire domainer industry overnight, I believe you've over reacted in this instance and would ask you to rethink.
I've read the contract and your legal team have been ill advised to request that a tag holder delete their lists, the clauses that appear to have been broken were 5.3 which is illegally capturing whois information and reshowing to the public, in this instance all you had to do was ask for the information to be removed so the service could continue.
I am now willing, as are a few others to set up a new deleting service as obviously we cannot do without this website, you have literally killed one half of my business operations overnight and I will suffer severly, so in common with clause 5.2 and as your legal team have researched this matter in its entirety already please could you tell me if I will be breaking the rules if I become a member and do exactly the same as deleting only without showing who caught what and showing tag holder name and showing domains dropping on the day without showing a countdown or specific date information.
Would that be acceptable? i.e. not showing any whois information at all and not regurgitated to the public at large. As you've researched this in full already this should be an easy answer. Furthermore I wish to complain about how poorly you have treated a member, you fired no warning shot, you sent no initial email, you went straight in for the kill which makes many of us believe you don't value the domainer community, nor accept it. Fair enough, react to a complaint but how you have do so has been wrong.
You and I both know which rules were broken, deleting is an acceptable service bar the showing of whois information which with a little foresight shouldn't have been used in that manner but it did take a complaint for you to do anything about a service that you've long known about so even in that respect your reaction has been quite over the top.
You should be careful in future, you just told a tag holder to delete all information pertaining to the whois database when you had no right to do so under the contract, it was a suspension, not a termination. His company really should now sue you for loss of earnings.
I look forward to hearing from you on the above matters, I realise you can't discuss individual cases but as I will be setting up deleting two and others deleting three, four and five, we would appreciate knowing what exactly was wrong with the deleting service over and above the showing of dates and tag holder name. essentially whois info being redistributed. As according to the contract with Nominet, holding lists and making available to the end user is perfectly within rights.
I would also urge you, before Nominet loses any more income due to this decision, to reinstate the tag holder and dac access with immediate effect as they have complied with you wishes - rather foolishly I might add though that comment is more aimed at your legal team - and also write to the tag holder stating that the deleting service is fine if they simply do not show the 92 or 99 countdown and the tag holder that catches domains.
I trust you will do this with immediate effect as there are no reasons why you cannot, and in doing so your income and the interest in your company can begin to rise again and as a community we can put this all behind us and learn from this episode, failure to do so will create an awkward atmosphere and be bad for both our business interests.
Please reply at your earliest convenience.
Yous Sincerely
Lee Owen
