Things are far from “business as usual” at Nominet…
Nominet have lost the Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) contract with the Government
here worth £30.5 million. Which will lose the company about £6-8 million a year over next five years. That will put the whole Nominet cyber diversification strategy in jeopardy, when you consider the cyber unit made a £2.4 million loss last financial year -
see FY23 accounts page 9.
Losing PDNS comes after
selling off Cyglass in the States for $1 pre-pack administration, after buying it for $6 million with a huge burn rate per month. Millions upon millions of pounds have been wasted on this cyber strategy over the
last decade.
Also after three years of trying to “fix” the situation (post EGM) the current board seems to have decided to cut its losses. Which involves combining Registry + Cyber in to one business unit and making 70 people redundant.
No doubt the .uk infrastructure has also been neglected while this decade distraction happened (hence hiring a CTO) and now we will all (registrants) have to pay for a new registry platform from 2025. Due to no growth and flatlining registry statistics.
As for the good news of the NHS contract and the .gov.uk contract mentioned above…
The
NHS contract seems to have gone to a company in the US called
insight.com - how much of the £15 million is Nominet getting?
The .gov.uk contract which replaces JISC and Centralnic’s software is only worth about
£1.3 million over 5 years. Very odd that contract goes out to tender when Centralnic only got hold of it
three years ago. Some might even say Nominet are doing it at cost?
Perhaps Nominet should be more transparent on this train wreck rather than send carefully worded emails to members only.