New controversy(ies?) at Nominet

The Register's article covers a lot of ground, and makes for interesting reading...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/25/nominet_ceo/

It continues to amaze me, meanwhile, how little interest Nominet is showing in the progress of .uk.

 

I think its a good but slightly shit stirring article.

You know I hate to say it but articles like this make me thank the lucky stars one invested in .com too.

Doesn't anyone else feel there's a veiled fragility about the long term of our domains under Nominet.

(Nom run like TV Licence interesting concept!?)




But hey all our domains

 

Thanks for posting.

Thinking about this a little, there never seems to have been that much promotion about the benefits of using the short .uk domain names.

 

Got a call recently from Nominet asking me what I was doing to promote .uk domain names. Could have phoned them with same question.

 

Do you ever wonder if many of those that now work for Nominet find the activity of managing a domain name registry *alone* simply not enough?

 

I think it's been obvious for a while that Nominet are no longer seeing themselves as "just a registry". The only question is how far down the pecking order of importance they place the registry function (and a bonus question: how much further down that same pecking order do they place the promotion/marketing of *.uk domains)?

 

BTW, the vagueness of the quotes in this article from Nominet's new CEO, Russell Haworth, are quite revealing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/28/new_nominet_ceo/

For instance:
"It's too early to tell what areas of growth will be best for Nominet"

(it shouldn't be "too early to tell" because it would be best to grow the NAMESPACE not some random vaguely web-related stuff)

 

It's such a tragic missed opportunity - they could have brought in somebody to take their massive surplus, hire in some genuinely smart marketing bods, and lead the charge to restart the upward growth in *.uk registrations, and given .de a real run for its money as the largest ccTLD in the world. The staff incentive scheme could have been completely recast around new registrations/renewals/customer retention so that the entire organisation, tip to toe, lived and breathed *.uk.

Instead, they're further off the path since Lesley left than they have been at any time since I've been involved in the industry, and they seem determined to head randomly into the jungle rather than get back to their core namespace business.

 

Unfortunately, I think the government option is probably only meant to be a "very last resort" measure - in other words, they can't step in just because efforts to grow the namespace are on the back burner while various unrelated projects are on the boil. A slow-growing or stagnant *.uk does not in itself threaten to destabilise the UK's web infrastructure, so probably wouldn't provide suitable cause to trigger an intervention.

It's funny, other ccTLD registries (even the huge DENic) seem to have little difficulty sticking to their core business. I wonder why Nominet is so different?

The contrast between
http://www.denic.de/en/denic.html

and
http://www.nominet.org.uk/who-we-are
http://www.nominet.org.uk/sites/default/files/Nominet_values_diagram.jpg

is pretty stark.

 

I don't particularly object to an expanded role - just so long as the primary role remains primary.

 

I also took a look at denic in respect of how they compare to Nominet only the other day and it has been my intention to look further at other ccTLD's as well.

In 2008 and earlier the Nominet board was much smaller than it is today. I believe there were four elected directors, as there are now, and the company Managing Director (Lesley Cowley at the time). We had no chair, no appointed directors, no CEO, no CCO, no COO and no CTO with board positions (is the CCO a board position? I presume it is because the other three are).

You may recall that Angus Hanton (in 2007 ) and then Jim Davies (in 2008 ) were elected as directors by the membership. It seems likely that having two perceived domain name investor friendly directors on the board concerned either the remainder of the board, and/or the Nominet staff and/or some of the membership into stirring up some form of action which became known as Plan G.

Is it likely that certain employees of Nominet have never been able to forget this or is it something that is always going to remain firmly in their minds, perhaps to the detriment of the company as a whole?

I wonder if the substantial change in the board structure that occurred out after those two members were elected to director status, although both eventually resigned for differing reasons, would have panned out as it did if one or both hadn't been elected.

Are the membership sure that Nominet are hiring the right people who have enough interest in pursuing core domain name activities rather than exploring other avenues? For example are too many employees or appointed directors coming from certain similar backgrounds?

Are the membership sure that members of the board are really interested and involved enough in the wider domain name industry or are too many lacking enough understanding and appreciation of it?

Ultimately Nominet is a composition of people. Those people change overtime and new people bring differing ideas with them. There may be a deep rooted overall way of thinking that needs weeding out and changing. We have a theoretical new broom, so to speak, in the form of a new CEO however I just don't feel I know enough about him to pass much comment. I would be interested to hear from Antonia Seymour (the former CCO of 8 months) to find out how she found day to day work within the domain name industry as someone who hadn't worked in it up until then.

Edwin, if you were given free reign to change things at Nominet what fundamental changes do you think you might consider making?

 

- Stop pursuing non-domain related activities
- Stop funding the Nominet Trust (save the money against contingencies, provide periodic discounted registrations/renewals or spend more on growing the namespace but spend it on DOMAIN STUFF)
- Stop trying to grow bigger and bigger
- Make the strength of the *.uk namespace THE only metric of success, not an irrelevant metric like revenue or number of staff or government clout.

That's pretty much it.

If that required dramatically shrinking the organisation, it would probably be all the better for it.

 

I think I've written about it before - I've certainly talked about it - but one way to achieve this would be to split Nominet in 2:

- Nominet Classic: the namespace
- Nominet Blue Sky: everything else

The names may be playful, but the idea seems solid enough.

Nominet Classic is a quiet, stable, low-growth organisation dedicated solely to maintaining, managing and growing the *.uk namespace, with the levels of staff, resources and expertise appropriate to that task AND NO MORE. It remains rigorously not-for-profit with a tightened remit that prevents "mission creep".

Nominet Blue Sky can do whatever it wants other than *.uk namespace related activities (initially - i.e. it can't exploit the "insider knowledge" of its origin). It can be as capitalistic and very-much-for-profit as any other company. In the future it can also do stuff to do with domains, but on the same basis as any other company independent of Nominet Classic would i.e. it does not have any preferrential access to Nominet Classic's activities. After possibly some initial "seed" funding from the former Nominet, it would have to make its money just like any other company.

The two entities should not be allowed to cross-fertilise each other (personnel, money, intellectual property) after they've been set up i.e. it's a totally clean split.

Neither organisation should have anything to do with funding a "Nominet Trust" or similar successor organisation.

Benefits
- Laser-like organisational focus on *.uk from Nominet Classic, with an organisation much more in tune with the domain market
- Opportunity for high fliers and the most ambitious to go for the high risk/reward Nominet Blue Sky
- No need for large scale redundancies
- No more meaningless Nominet Trust money give-aways

One more option: spin off a third entity, "Nominet Trust". It can keep the funds it has now (it's got a pretty decent war chest) but after that it goes down the route of other charities/non-profits i.e. it has to raise its own funds via its own activities, local/UK/EU grants, corporate partnerships etc. There is no magic money tree behind it any more automatically funnelling money to it.

 

What would you consider to be the non-domain name activities that they shouldn't pursue? What actually would you give the chop to if you could? For example is ENUM enough domain name or non-domain name in your opinion (not withstanding the lack of interest in ENUM)?

Was the Trust not in part a method to avoid tax liabilities in the face of what was a mounting surplus? Could Nominet remain not for profit without the trust and use the surplus for domain name related activities?

How does one deal with the issue of recruiting good staff into what is a niche industry that requires long term understanding without either being forced to recruit just from the existing pool of industry talent or risking bringing in people that want to make radical changes as part of a career stepping stone or chuck it in after a short while because we're all too narrowly focused?



(from iPhone)

 

ENUM is irrelevant. Nominet's focus should be the UK's ccTLD namespace hierarchy i.e. *.uk. And that's IT.

Better to pay 20% (or whatever) of the surplus funds in tax and save the rest for a rainy day than throw away 100% by handing the money to Nominet Trust.

There's no reason whatsoever for Nominet to be a radical, go-getting, innovating organisation. Managing *.uk is a "good enough" ambition for what should be a small, stable organisation. And the stream of reg/renewal income should be sufficient to cover that need indefinitely.

 

Yes. All a NFP company is, is one where the profits are not divided among the directors at the end of the year. They are not really very different from a LTD company.

You'll find that most big housing associations are NFPs and some make a big surplus each year, that is just reinvested into the company.

I say make Nominet a charity in its own right. Then it will have to be one member one vote, as that's the way the charity commission likes it to be

 

One would have thought that with the current changing domain landscape they would have been keener than ever to promote .UK over the next 3/5 years to stop any renewal leakage.

Like stated above, perhaps they are just bored and managing the registry, it isn't enough anymore.. vis we've a huge pot of cash what can we chuck it at now for the sake of it because the good'ol .uk can take care of itself and joe public will keep renewing indefinitely!

 

For a look at just how out of control costs are at Nominet, it's instructive to look at the personnel costs of the NZ registry since, apart from the order-of-magnitude difference in the number of domains under management (and hence the size of the various databases associated with them) they both should be carrying out the same sorts of activities (managing the namespace, dispute resolution etc.)

In the 2013/2014 fiscal year, Nominet spent...
£8,102,000 on wages and salaries
£982,000 on social security costs
£319,000 on other pension costs
£1,136,000 on director remuneration
TOTAL: £10,539,000
http://www.nominet.org.uk/sites/default/files/nominet_report_and_accounts_2014.pdf

The NZ namespace is handled by 2 organisations, DNCL and NZRS

DNCL spent...
NZ$709,693 on wages and salaries
NZ$137,830 on director remuneration
http://dnc.org.nz/content/DNCL_Annual_Report_2014.pdf

NZRS spent...
NZ$960,916 on wages and salaries
NZ$126,750 on director remuneration
https://nzrs.net.nz/sites/default/files/NZDNRL_Annual_Report_2013-14_2.pdf

For a total of
NZ$1,670,609 on wages and salaries (£777,185.91 using XE.com currency conversion)
NZ$264,580 on director remuneration (£123,056.19 ditto)
TOTAL: NZ$1,935,189 (£900,242.10)

So Nominet spent £10,539,000 and the 2 *.nz organisations spent £900,242.10 on the people that should be responsible for doing almost exactly the same thing.

(I'm afraid I simply can't accept that it costs an extra £9.5 million in personnel costs to stick 10,000,000 more entries in a few databases)

 

The latest advice from Russell Haworth is that people should ensure their social media privacy settings are correct to prevent potential "accidental oversharing", following research commissioned by Nominet!

Looks like this new guy has slotted in well!

Grant

 

I'd be in favour of a "nominet classic", I was never in favour of the trust, I'm sure there is a need for some of the things the trust does, but for Nominet funds to simply be poured from 1 pot to another at will, that just seems wrong.

Are we not members of Nominet and therefore joint owners and have a responsibility for it?

I'd love to see a return to core business of managing the .UK domain space, introduce 1 member 1 vote, membership tightened up with another "interim level" where you could sign up and get discounted domains without the responsibility of the traditional membership (non voting) so that those with a genuine interest in managing the .UK domain space would be "free of the members who only want the discount", perhaps this would increase the percentage of votes cast making it more representative. You'd probably shed a lot of the current members and allow those with interest to get close to the action of managing the name space. Due to lack of historical reseller offerings, I'd suggest there's a very high percentage of current members who don't care about anything other than reduced rate registration fees, the smaller user base would hopefully open up the policy and technical discussions.

Look at the recent .wales, they used Nominet funds to get this running, promoted it as a Nominet offering, yet ordinary members who aren't ICANN registered are prevented from offering these domains to their customers (not that I've had a single enquiry for .wales registration!) I have no objection to Nominet (Classic) running other top level registries as a standalone customer offering, even investing in suitable infrastructure if needed, but if it's branded Nominet then it should be for the benefit of all members (I know there will no doubt be lots of red tape reasons why .wales can't be offered to all members, but that's a different debate)

Touching on Edwin's mention of .NZ, I think Nominet could learn a lot from looking at how it's done over in New Zealand.

As for surplus funds, then they should either re-invest it or just pay up the tax and keep it in the bank for future years.

Just my Friday afternoon 2p's worth.