Today I realized how neandartal some services in Israel still are. I tried to modify a domain I own, and change the domain owner since it is now being managed by a company and not a person. I have been modifying .com, .org, .co.uk, .de and many other TLDs for years now.
Right now, the registrar for .il domains is isoc.org.il and I suspect that like most things in Israel they received the “license” to operate this registrar as a result of some political connection. It used to be handled by a university sponsored body called “Machba”.
What bothers me is that these guys have the worse possible registrar system, and like a monopoly they don’t really care their system sucks big time. Undisturbed, They inflict their strange and nefarious schemes upon us Israelis. For example you have to pay for 2 years in advance. Renewal is also for 2 years at a time. Strange? Wait! For it does not end here… Perhaps you want to modify some detail in your domain? You have to FAX your signature (yes! you heard me right). Perhaps they should change their name to isuck.org.il.
Anyway today I tried to modify the owner, and hear this: Fax is not enough. They want money for it as if I am registering a new domain! This means 280nis AGAIN (that’s $60 USD). They treat the name change as a transfer. In the US or in many european registrars, this is a free operation. My American registrar is namecheap.com and they have an even better system – all a user has to do is create an account on their system (free) and then I can “push” the domain to his account, again – free!
So never mind that I pay for com/net/org domains $8.80 USD/year which is $21.20 less per year, and never mind that the guys at isoc charge for a minimum of 2 years, I also have to throw away my investment when I want to change the domain holder (free anywhere else!). I spoke with one of their guys on the phone, and instead of agreeing with me that things should improve he started finding all kinds of excuses for the mediocrity of the system (1. look at other countries they charge the same or more, 2. the system is not that bad [yes it is!!], 3. how can you compare a “generic” .com domain to .co.il domains? 4. etc, etc…).
Oh – I also have a “NIC” (Yes for those of you who remember the horror that was internic.net many years ago when the US registration system was held by little green trolls). A feeble attempt to assign some kind of “ID” to my persona. It would have been a good idea if executed properly – in theory I would have the same NIC forever, and I would keep updating the details for my NIC as I change phone numbers of move to another house, and all domains related to that NIC would automatically have the new NIC. Except it doesn’t work!!! My NIC is AF6442-IL and it contains outdated details. If I change the details of my NIC in one domain, they will not change for other domains. At least in the old internic.net days it did work and you could change the NIC details and they would update for all domains using that NIC, but I guess the blue trolls in Israel are even worse than the little green trolls that used to roam internic.net!