Photography with the Left Eye

It seems like a good idea to have a business model based on something other than ripping off your clients. Sure, there are always scams, and in a bad economy scams seem to multiply. But companies that want to survive past next year need customers who come back. Willingly.

I have just washed my hands of a company, 1and1 Internet (domain registrar, internet presence provider, etc) which seems to have as its business model the notion that you will sign up for something because it is cheap, and then they will force you to buy it as long as they can. In this case, the something is domain registration. I registered a domain (it probably came as a freebie with something) and realized only after my credit card was charged that they had set it to “auto renew.” So I complained, via email and phone, and assumed (!) that the story had ended. Nope. Another year, another auto-renew. I search on the pages for a way to turn it off. There is not a way. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It takes a call to their complaint center, which is not open for business, but a helpful recording directs you to the mysterious cancel.1and1.com, where you can shut off auto-renew. It’s also the same place where you actually cancel. They make that as hard as possible.

Let me contrast that with register.com, another (and probably the oldest) of the big domain registrars. They also had auto-renew for a domain of mine. They also charge about 4 times the going rate for domains. But when I got the auto-renew notice, I called, and they flipped it back. With 1and1, they won’t reverse it. And if you dispute the credit card charge, they send it to collections. Probably grossly illegal, but not worth the hassle for $10.

But I predict they are short lived as a company.

Pandora, yesterday. I am amazed and grateful at the beauty and physicality that the models I work with express. Thanks, Pandora.