Look at the current Nominet board - a Chair from academia and public service; a CEO who has worked for over 10 years inside Nominet; a Chief Operating Officer who doesn’t seem to have any working experience outside Nominet; two registrars with big domain businesses; a Non-Executive who works mainly for Nominet and the Nominet Trust; a small business entrepreneur; two professional Non-Executives from the banking and public sectors; and a CTO who replaced the Finance Director just as growth rates were starting to plummet
… and not one engager or communicator!
The ccTLD market is sloping down, and 1900 new gTLDs are coming onto the market. Businesses are gearing up to rebrand and direct.uk is looking on the face of it like an attractive proposition. (I undoubtedly will lose OXIL.UK to the spanish company who owns OXIL.COM who will probably beat me at auction and then host from a UK certificated server provided by Mr. Vollrath et al. - but that’s another matter)
The key stakeholders here are:
- brandholders who struggle to capture the right names, probably unaware of the whole proposal (because they usually scream very loudly when there’s any move to open up new namespace)
- portfolio holders
- registrars
- citizens who are about to be bombarded with citizen.google, citizen.bbc, citizen.london, name.twitter, name.twit .. and old.co.uk, and new.uk
- the UK government who owns the UK brand and has been bamboozled by promises of a safer, crime-free, happy internet
The non-communicators send out their marketing guy to big up .co.uk and then stop doing that and big up .uk and their lawyer who apparently talks about an auction being a fair process (please correct me on this, I cannot find the reference).
In the meantime, just reading this thread it is quite clear that we don’t know what we want, there are threats and opportunities and no consistent view about the best way forward.
The first consultation was dreadful, conducted behind closed doors and with QC’s wheeled in to tell Dickie, Thomas, Nora .. that they can’t vote (gosh well they could have saved £30K by not bothering to get that advice for a start). The situation calls for engagement and a bottom up consultation, and a vote amongst the membership to test the desirability of such a shock to our market. Sorry three shocks, they are also proposing DNSSEC, and UK patriotism at the same time. They may or may not be good ideas, but all together - crazy!
It’s time to engage with the members and stakeholders BEFORE they decide what to do. I'm not convinced that these people are capable of doing that.