What are my rights as a domain 'owner'?
I've recently had some trouble with the domain registration agent I've been using for the past few years here in the UK. I currently own several .com domains and a couple of .me.uk ones, all of which were registered through the same agent. This agent is/was a reseller for the Tucows/OpenSRS service (Link).
Out of the blue one day I received a couple of emails telling me that my agent was no longer an authorised reseller for Tucows, and that I should transfer my domains over to another one of their resellers before they expired. However I only received these emails relating to two of my domains. I was rather concerned by this sudden turn of events so I decided to transfer those two domains over to another reseller just to be on the safe side.
Two months later I receive an email from a company who claim to have taken over the agent's customer base and who are now listed as the reseller contact for those domains that I hadn't previously transferred. Now until this email, I hadn't been contacted at all about this so-called transfer. The original reseller/agent's website still seemed to be operational and I had been maintaining the records for my domains through that site. After receiving the email I checked out their site again and it appears to have been taken over by this other company.
Now aside from the fact that my personal details were handed over to another company without my consent, upon reading the information on the site it turns out that when my domains are up for renewal they want to charge me 250% more than I had been charged up until that point. They also charge to transfer domains away to another reseller, which is something which was always a free service with my old reseller. I can still access the domain control panel at OpenSRS, but this company seems to have locked the .com domains to prevent them being transferred. As for the .me.uk domains, they refuse to perform the tag change to allow me to transfer them to another reseller unless I pay them a fee.
I have sent them a couple of emails explaining the situation and demanding that they unlock the .com domains, but aside from what appeared to be a 'copy and paste' answer about the option of going direct to Nominet and ICANN and paying a transfer fee they are totally unresponsive.
Strangely enough I noticed yesterday that one of the domains had now become unlocked, so I successfully transferred that one to a new reseller. However, the remaining domains are still locked and I have no way to even check the records for the .me.uk ones.
So my question is where do I stand on this legally? Are they obliged to offer the same prices and services as my old reseller because they have taken over the customer database? Are they in breach of the Data Protection Act for handling customer details without those customer's consent?
I have a little while to sort this out, as most of the domains don't expire until early next year, but I would like to get it fixed as soon as possible. So what do you think?