EGM - What happened?

[Edwin]

Bear in mind that when the wholesale price rose from £2.50/year to £3.50/year (and then rose again) the big public-facing registrars put their own prices up by far more than the wholesale price increase. (It's all very well to say tiny registrar X didn't choose to gouge its customers that way, but that's irrelevant if the vast majority of people and companies have never heard of or used them).

Net effect: almost all consumers are paying a LOT more for their domains than they were before Nominet started getting greedy. For example, at 123-Reg, the price is (£0.99+VAT plus £11.99+VAT)=£12.98+VAT for a 2-year .co.uk or .uk registration. Why did I write it that way? Because they have a 99p domain promotion, but in the small print they point out that's just for year 1 of a 2-year registration. And their renewals are £11.99+VAT a year. GoDaddy charges 1p but £11.99 for the 2nd year and renewals, and you have to register for 2 years minimum. And so on.

I have already posted elsewhere about the eye-watering cost increase to domainers. Not going to repeat that here. Follow the link if you're interested...
https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/thre...sale-price-has-evolved-over-the-years.171332/

 

[Edwin]

Here are 2 analyses I did on the subject of wholesale and retail domain pricing in 2015/2016, around the time of the original price rise, and incorporating registrar reactions to it.

(It's not worth my time and effort to update the material for 2021, but the overall picture these documents paint remains valid.)

Wholesale domain price rise
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rsFMaIL5wuMwWM_rpslCNBdFj0YvU54s/view?usp=sharing

Retail domain price rise
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1il0feKNR7j6KjEqusJ1J13JSq93sE_b6/view?usp=sharing

 

[jmcc]

Maybe they should increase the wholesale price to £10.00 so domainers would have to release some of the domains giving the public a better chance at them.

A strange effect happens when domain name prices are raised. It increases some renewal rates because people think that the money they have sunk into renewing the domain names over the years makes them more valuable. (The Sunk Cost Fallacy.) If the price rise is too steep, it sends the TLD into a tailspin but if it is done gradually, it helps the renewal rates. Most of the registries understand this effect and are very careful with it. It is why some of the new gTLDs have a first year renewal rate of around 70%. They are typically the ones with a registration fee that is two or three times that of .COM. The ccTLDs have a captive audience in that they generally dominate their country's market.

Regards...jmcc

 

[foz]

The voting rights numbers have been published:
https://media.nominet.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Nominet-UK-Voting-Rights-2021.pdf

Regards...jmcc

Those votes rights to what's in my account are out significantly.

 

[HariSeldon]

Those votes rights to what's in my account are out significantly.

Your voting rights are not the same as how many domains you have in your account.

Voting rights are aggregated by adding two calculations together:
25% of the votes shall be distributed equally amongst the membership
75% of the votes allocated shall be distributed in relation to the number of paid-for domains

 

[foz]

Your voting rights are not the same as how many domains you have in your account.

Voting rights are aggregated by adding two calculations together:
25% of the votes shall be distributed equally amongst the membership
75% of the votes allocated shall be distributed in relation to the number of paid-for domains

Okay then. Thanks.

 

[HariSeldon]

Okay then. Thanks.

There's actually quite a complicated formula applied to work out the voting rights which was designed so that the likes of GoDaddy with their 3.5 million domains don't have too much voting power against most of the little fishes like us.

Nominet Voting Rights

Having said that, I must be missing something because the voting rights declared by Nominet do not look right to me either.

Nominet's EGM page has a link to "the voting rights for the 2021 EGM" which is a PDF which states GoGaddy voting rights are 3,572,543 ... I thought the maximum votes that anyone should have would be around 10% of that figure, perhaps someone here can explain the discrepancy?

 

[monaghan]

I was all for the publicbenefit movememnt but I disagree in some part with the pricing issue, for the general public the cost of a uk registration is small and not really an issue, but for domainers sitting on 1000's of domains yes its a big issue. I myself would rather pay a few extra £ if I knew the proceeds would go to charity.

Maybe they should increase the wholesale price to £10.00 so domainers would have to release some of the domains giving the public a better chance at them.

It's not about the cost of the domain at point of registration, if it costs £10 to register, then it's fair to charge £10, however, each price rise has just resulted in larger pots of cash sloshing about in Nominet leaving a not for profit organization with a huge pot of cash to dispose of. As I've posted before, it's not down to Nominet to collect for charity, charitable giving is an optional decision based on personal beliefs and values, when it becomes compulsory, it's no longer charity.

 

[jasman]

The wholesale price needs to come down for the simple reason that Nominet's purpose is to administer a digital national resource (.uk domains) as cheaply and efficiently as possible for the benefit of the UK. This means UK businesses and individuals and the membership is of particular significance because it is comprised largely of those UK businesses and individuals closely connected with the Internet community and industry so it is right that they should help keep Nominet on course to do their duty as custodian of the national resource.

Nominet are there not to benefit themselves, but to provide a service to the UK economy and UK population, rather like the Highways Agency, hence it is right that they should be strictly non-profit. But in the last decade both former CEOs have usurped this noble purpose for their own misguided empire-building ambitions (which rather tellingly have invariably been failures) and to justify ever more greedy pay rises for themselves. They were not running a FTSE500 company (wouldn't last long in one with all those failures!), they were entrusted to manage a national resource and relentlessly trying to profit from it as though the resource belonged to them at the members' and public's expense constitutes a abuse of their position.

We Nominet members have an important role to play because our automatic right to wholesale prices ensures a layer of intense competition just above the registry level, which would be a pure monopoly without that. Nominet's leadership have been behaving as though they are a pure monopoly in recent years to the point of ignoring the membership (and hence the Internet community at large) and acting against their interests. But enough is enough and now, disgraced, they will hopefully have the sense to realise that their inappropriate management of the national resource and arrogant attitude to the membership was nurturing the seeds of their own demise.

We members also help to make the industry more efficient by having a fluid aftermarket for registered domains and this is kept as efficient as possible by having prices as low as possible so we are willing to take more risks. Investing £thousands in a premium domain would be far more risky if it were not fairly easy to resell it again in the aftermarket - maybe at a profit, maybe at a loss - but at least you are sure to get a significant chunk of your capital back. It is the aftermarket that ensures that, and that is comprised predominantly of Nominet members.

Please let's hear no more of this £10 nonsense. 99% of members (and the public) want prices to go down. We need to reverse the aftermath of the last decade's bad leadership and reduce prices down to Nominet pre-profiteering levels, not increase them. Now all our energies should be focused on holding Nominet to account and getting a commitment from them to run the registry as a non-profit organisation as they should, not to enable them to profiteer even more, that's absurd!

 

[poetry]

Year after year Edwin produces better analyses
Using data available to nominet and which they
No doubt pay consultants a fortune for.

 

[Ben Thomas]

I was all for the publicbenefit movememnt but I disagree in some part with the pricing issue, for the general public the cost of a uk registration is small and not really an issue, but for domainers sitting on 1000's of domains yes its a big issue. I myself would rather pay a few extra £ if I knew the proceeds would go to charity.

Maybe they should increase the wholesale price to £10.00 so domainers would have to release some of the domains giving the public a better chance at them.

Fred, this is a weird question, have you ever heard of Easy Domains?

ON-TOPIC: I noticed that Nominet has not fallen apart at the seams yet. Amazing really, considering they were adamant this would happen lol.

 

[monaghan]

ON-TOPIC: I noticed that Nominet has not fallen apart at the seams yet. Amazing really, considering they were adamant this would happen lol.

It's a shame the board had so little faith in their employees ability to continue to run the shop after their departure, seems the board were as critical of the staff as they were about the members.