7 ms·

Nominet announces that four directors have been removed

105 points by blibble 6y ago

blibble 6y ago
(sorry it's not the page title but otherwise it's context-less) more context: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/nominet_board_sacked/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/nominet_board_sacked/ and https://publicbenefit.uk/ https://publicbenefit.uk/
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Thanks for posting this, was very informative. I think The Register did a fantastic job in their reporting on this. They clearly skewer the CEO and cronies on the board, but always back it up with clear data and arguments that just emphasize how poorly Nominet was run.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  el Reg have covered the sad failings in Nominet for years. The article you linked contains a lot of links to prior coverage and are worth reading if you have some spare time. Nominet has a monopoly over .uk. They are also the org that were tasked with ENUM for the UK. Back in the day there was a web page on Nominet's website describing how it would revolutionise telephony. Then it vanished. For a laugh I called them and was told that ENUM would never be enabled in the UK and no, I can't set it up myself either - they would not allow the delegation. I doubt ENUM will ever become a thing. I should explain that ENUM allows people to run their own telephone numbers. Yes we can all do VoIP via email addresses (!) but those normal looking phone numbers can be made to work via ENUM without involving a "provider". If we could use ENUM then I could register my phone number via DNS. The following is slightly adjusted to avoid my PBX exploding. So 01935 476222 becomes 441935476222. My local town is Yeovil and that has the code 01935 within the UK (so does at least one Sherbourne and a few other bits hereabouts.) The country code for the UK is 44 and the rule here is you drop the leading 0 to make a canonical "international" phone number. Now, reverse the digits and put dots in between then and stick a suffix on the end and pop it into DNS with a pointer to a PBX or even a single handset that talks VoIP. This presentation explains it all: https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof8/Daley-ENUM.pdf https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof8/Daley-ENUM.pdf (lol!)
- donmcronald 6y ago
  > At an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on Monday, a single resolution to remove all five passed narrowly [PDF] with 52.7 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 53 per cent of members. Wow. 53% turnout for something very important and with a limited membership. Why isn't voting compulsory? Vote (or abstain) or lose your membership IMO. It's sad that most of the domain registries have been overrun by business vultures that aren't even competent enough to grow their core business; selling domains.
iSloth 6y ago
It was close, but the right decision. 53.5% turnout For 52.74% Against 47.26%
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  ~ 52% to 48%. The cursed numbers! For those unfamiliar with the pareidolia / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon regarding that ratio, let me provide a few examples, from earliest to most recent: https://m.facebook.com/13312631635/posts/the-cursed-52-48-ratio-is-back-but-not-how-you-might-think/10157710542806636/ https://m.facebook.com/13312631635/posts/the-cursed-52-48-ra... https://old.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/l6cgha/french_presidential_election_poll_second_round/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/l6cgha/french_pre... https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/lzcfo9/breaking_scottish_independence_voting_intention/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/lzcfo9/breaking...
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  The much-criticised CEO announcing his intention to step down yesterday probably took a bit of heat off: https://twitter.com/Nominet/status/1373674125357674497 https://twitter.com/Nominet/status/1373674125357674497
M2Ys4U 6y ago
I'm unnerved that the vote was so close, but it's undoubtedly the right call. Thanks to all of the Nominet members who voted yes. Hopefully the remaining board members will appoint the two proposed interim directors and work can start on returning the organisation to its true public benefit roots.
henvic 6y ago
Where they ever responsible for .io too? I hate how I paid for o1.io and their system failed on me. Poorly designed system, and they ignored my attempts to get support. Many weeks later they reverted my transaction with PayPal and eventually announced the domain was 10k pounds. Damn it!
- spzb 6y ago
  > Where they ever responsible for .io too? Apparently not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io
- wu_187 6y ago
  All the new TLDs have what's called "premium" domains. These encompass the one word and short domain names, which they will sell for MUCH higher. When they are flagged as premium on the back end, most registrars do a piss poor job of advertising it as such to the customer and will even allow you to go as far as ordering it if it's available, just to refund it after because it's actually a premium domain and they don't properly support the registration of them directly.
  - M2Ys4U 6y ago
    .io is not one of the "new" gTLDs, though, it's a ccTLD just like .uk
mjw1007 6y ago
Some earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26191570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26191570
walrus01 6y ago
That's astonishing, the amount of compensation the board thought they could pay themselves. The technical and regulatory complexity of running a domain registrar do not warrant compensation of such absurd figures. People who have 20 years of experience running core routers and backbone operations at globe-spanning international transit and transport ISPs that have thousands of POPs don't get paid anywhere near that figure. The complexity of an ISP on the scale of Telia, Level3 or NTT is far beyond a top level domain operator. "Those supporting the vote are also unhappy at compensation paid to senior management. The website points to a 38 per cent drop in operating profit between 2016 and 2020, while at the same time the pay of the top three directors, who also sit on Nominet’s board, jumped 70 per cent, from £1m to £1.7m total. Last year, Haworth received a 30 per cent pay rise, bringing his annual compensation to £593,000." https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/
- mjw1007 6y ago
  They didn't think they were in charge of running a domain registrar. They thought they were in charge of running a shiny business that was in the process of transforming away from being principally a domain registrar, in the name of growth. The CEO was a mergers and acquisition specialist. You can find their stated reasons for believing that growth was vital here: https://www.nominet.uk/the-case-for-growth/ https://www.nominet.uk/the-case-for-growth/ « Without growth, we can’t innovate, and innovation is essential if we are to be ready for new technologies and emerging threats. Without growth and innovation, we can’t keep our vital staff who connect more than 10 million .UK domains and maintain our service without disruption or downtime. » I don't know whether they really believed these theories, or whether they really think of growth as an end in itself and were reaching for justifications, but the latter seems more likely to me.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    It's not obvious it was conscious. It's an endemic problem in British business culture, and there are obvious rewards for conforming. People who do "growth" and "strategy" invariably seem to believe they're worth the big money, even if they're actually harming their organisations and lowering their effectiveness and survival prospects. If they're as good as they think they are they should have no trouble selling their innovation elsewhere.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I wasn't previously familiar with the background on this, but it got me thinking how incredibly common it is for these types of large, public organizations to eventually become overcome by corruption. There is so much essentially free money flying around that leadership eventually tries to convince themselves that they deserve a bigger slice of some of those millions (or billions). Other prominent examples: 1. ICANN and the whole Public Interest Registry in the US. 2. The well-documented corruption in the International Olympic Committee and many national olympic committees. 3. FIFA, almost too much corruption to name. I wonder if something could be changed about the mindset when these organizations are set up that could reduce this corruption. That is, instead of pretending from they outset that they exist for the public benefit, accept the reality that with the amount of money that they handle that they have all the incentives to become corrupt and have something like a separate auditor/oversight board with different incentives from the get go.
- headmelted 6y ago
  I dunno, that oversight board sounds like they must work really hard to provide the kind of high standards of oversight we’ve come to expect. They should probably provide a supplementary package of measures to allow for rolling extensions of compliance deadlines for an initially low fee to help fund future oversight and yachts.
  - leoc 6y ago
    Also, a lot of those famously corrupt big bodies like the IOC and FIFA are international organsations. It's not easy to get a majority of the national member organisations, or their governments, to support strong action against corruption.
- lmm 6y ago
  NGOs, quangos and charities are all corrupt by default. They have no reason not to be corrupt. IMO these things should either a) be actual businesses, accountable to the market, or b) be actual government agencies, accountable through political mechanisms. When we try to blur the lines we all too often end up with the worst of both worlds. Unfortunately the general public hears "non-profit" and assumes that means an organisation that's more likely to respect their interests, when in fact the reverse is true.
gerdesj 6y ago
Nominet runs .uk and associated internets stuff. This is quite important stuff for a quite important economy. It is a monopoly for that function and has minimal oversight by stakeholders other than "members" - ISPs, not you and me. You and me seem to have a minimal importance despite being the actual end subjects. My .co.uk website is a subject but I have no say in my country's internet governance. I won't dwell on monarchical parallels here! Over the last few years Nominet (a non profit in the UK sense) have been accused of inflating Director's salaries and attempting projects outside their remit (which have lost money) - vanity projects. The governance rules look ridiculous: GoDaddy (large US firm) has more say than many UK ISPs by being a big fat thingie. GD did of course stand up for their customers by abstaining (I may be wrong here by being a day or two out of date) Thankfully the campaign run on https://publicbenefit.uk/ https://publicbenefit.uk/ actually worked.

105 points by blibble 6y ago

(sorry it's not the page title but otherwise it's context-less) more context: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/nominet_board_sacked/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/nominet_board_sacked/ and https://publicbenefit.uk/ https://publicbenefit.uk/

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Thanks for posting this, was very informative. I think The Register did a fantastic job in their reporting on this. They clearly skewer the CEO and cronies on the board, but always back it up with clear data and arguments that just emphasize how poorly Nominet was run.
gerdesj 6y ago
el Reg have covered the sad failings in Nominet for years. The article you linked contains a lot of links to prior coverage and are worth reading if you have some spare time. Nominet has a monopoly over .uk. They are also the org that were tasked with ENUM for the UK. Back in the day there was a web page on Nominet's website describing how it would revolutionise telephony. Then it vanished. For a laugh I called them and was told that ENUM would never be enabled in the UK and no, I can't set it up myself either - they would not allow the delegation. I doubt ENUM will ever become a thing. I should explain that ENUM allows people to run their own telephone numbers. Yes we can all do VoIP via email addresses (!) but those normal looking phone numbers can be made to work via ENUM without involving a "provider". If we could use ENUM then I could register my phone number via DNS. The following is slightly adjusted to avoid my PBX exploding. So 01935 476222 becomes 441935476222. My local town is Yeovil and that has the code 01935 within the UK (so does at least one Sherbourne and a few other bits hereabouts.) The country code for the UK is 44 and the rule here is you drop the leading 0 to make a canonical "international" phone number. Now, reverse the digits and put dots in between then and stick a suffix on the end and pop it into DNS with a pointer to a PBX or even a single handset that talks VoIP. This presentation explains it all: https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof8/Daley-ENUM.pdf https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof8/Daley-ENUM.pdf (lol!)
donmcronald 6y ago
> At an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on Monday, a single resolution to remove all five passed narrowly [PDF] with 52.7 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 53 per cent of members. Wow. 53% turnout for something very important and with a limited membership. Why isn't voting compulsory? Vote (or abstain) or lose your membership IMO. It's sad that most of the domain registries have been overrun by business vultures that aren't even competent enough to grow their core business; selling domains.

iSloth 6y ago

It was close, but the right decision. 53.5% turnout For 52.74% Against 47.26%

dane-pgp 6y ago
~ 52% to 48%. The cursed numbers! For those unfamiliar with the pareidolia / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon regarding that ratio, let me provide a few examples, from earliest to most recent: https://m.facebook.com/13312631635/posts/the-cursed-52-48-ratio-is-back-but-not-how-you-might-think/10157710542806636/ https://m.facebook.com/13312631635/posts/the-cursed-52-48-ra... https://old.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/l6cgha/french_presidential_election_poll_second_round/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/l6cgha/french_pre... https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/lzcfo9/breaking_scottish_independence_voting_intention/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/lzcfo9/breaking...
Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
The much-criticised CEO announcing his intention to step down yesterday probably took a bit of heat off: https://twitter.com/Nominet/status/1373674125357674497 https://twitter.com/Nominet/status/1373674125357674497

M2Ys4U 6y ago

I'm unnerved that the vote was so close, but it's undoubtedly the right call. Thanks to all of the Nominet members who voted yes. Hopefully the remaining board members will appoint the two proposed interim directors and work can start on returning the organisation to its true public benefit roots.

henvic 6y ago

Where they ever responsible for .io too? I hate how I paid for o1.io and their system failed on me. Poorly designed system, and they ignored my attempts to get support. Many weeks later they reverted my transaction with PayPal and eventually announced the domain was 10k pounds. Damn it!

spzb 6y ago
> Where they ever responsible for .io too? Apparently not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io
wu_187 6y ago
All the new TLDs have what's called "premium" domains. These encompass the one word and short domain names, which they will sell for MUCH higher. When they are flagged as premium on the back end, most registrars do a piss poor job of advertising it as such to the customer and will even allow you to go as far as ordering it if it's available, just to refund it after because it's actually a premium domain and they don't properly support the registration of them directly.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  .io is not one of the "new" gTLDs, though, it's a ccTLD just like .uk

mjw1007 6y ago

Some earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26191570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26191570

walrus01 6y ago

That's astonishing, the amount of compensation the board thought they could pay themselves. The technical and regulatory complexity of running a domain registrar do not warrant compensation of such absurd figures. People who have 20 years of experience running core routers and backbone operations at globe-spanning international transit and transport ISPs that have thousands of POPs don't get paid anywhere near that figure. The complexity of an ISP on the scale of Telia, Level3 or NTT is far beyond a top level domain operator. "Those supporting the vote are also unhappy at compensation paid to senior management. The website points to a 38 per cent drop in operating profit between 2016 and 2020, while at the same time the pay of the top three directors, who also sit on Nominet’s board, jumped 70 per cent, from £1m to £1.7m total. Last year, Haworth received a 30 per cent pay rise, bringing his annual compensation to £593,000." https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/

mjw1007 6y ago
They didn't think they were in charge of running a domain registrar. They thought they were in charge of running a shiny business that was in the process of transforming away from being principally a domain registrar, in the name of growth. The CEO was a mergers and acquisition specialist. You can find their stated reasons for believing that growth was vital here: https://www.nominet.uk/the-case-for-growth/ https://www.nominet.uk/the-case-for-growth/ « Without growth, we can’t innovate, and innovation is essential if we are to be ready for new technologies and emerging threats. Without growth and innovation, we can’t keep our vital staff who connect more than 10 million .UK domains and maintain our service without disruption or downtime. » I don't know whether they really believed these theories, or whether they really think of growth as an end in itself and were reaching for justifications, but the latter seems more likely to me.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  It's not obvious it was conscious. It's an endemic problem in British business culture, and there are obvious rewards for conforming. People who do "growth" and "strategy" invariably seem to believe they're worth the big money, even if they're actually harming their organisations and lowering their effectiveness and survival prospects. If they're as good as they think they are they should have no trouble selling their innovation elsewhere.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I wasn't previously familiar with the background on this, but it got me thinking how incredibly common it is for these types of large, public organizations to eventually become overcome by corruption. There is so much essentially free money flying around that leadership eventually tries to convince themselves that they deserve a bigger slice of some of those millions (or billions). Other prominent examples: 1. ICANN and the whole Public Interest Registry in the US. 2. The well-documented corruption in the International Olympic Committee and many national olympic committees. 3. FIFA, almost too much corruption to name. I wonder if something could be changed about the mindset when these organizations are set up that could reduce this corruption. That is, instead of pretending from they outset that they exist for the public benefit, accept the reality that with the amount of money that they handle that they have all the incentives to become corrupt and have something like a separate auditor/oversight board with different incentives from the get go.

headmelted 6y ago
I dunno, that oversight board sounds like they must work really hard to provide the kind of high standards of oversight we’ve come to expect. They should probably provide a supplementary package of measures to allow for rolling extensions of compliance deadlines for an initially low fee to help fund future oversight and yachts.
- leoc 6y ago
  Also, a lot of those famously corrupt big bodies like the IOC and FIFA are international organsations. It's not easy to get a majority of the national member organisations, or their governments, to support strong action against corruption.
lmm 6y ago
NGOs, quangos and charities are all corrupt by default. They have no reason not to be corrupt. IMO these things should either a) be actual businesses, accountable to the market, or b) be actual government agencies, accountable through political mechanisms. When we try to blur the lines we all too often end up with the worst of both worlds. Unfortunately the general public hears "non-profit" and assumes that means an organisation that's more likely to respect their interests, when in fact the reverse is true.

gerdesj 6y ago

Nominet runs .uk and associated internets stuff. This is quite important stuff for a quite important economy. It is a monopoly for that function and has minimal oversight by stakeholders other than "members" - ISPs, not you and me. You and me seem to have a minimal importance despite being the actual end subjects. My .co.uk website is a subject but I have no say in my country's internet governance. I won't dwell on monarchical parallels here! Over the last few years Nominet (a non profit in the UK sense) have been accused of inflating Director's salaries and attempting projects outside their remit (which have lost money) - vanity projects. The governance rules look ridiculous: GoDaddy (large US firm) has more say than many UK ISPs by being a big fat thingie. GD did of course stand up for their customers by abstaining (I may be wrong here by being a day or two out of date) Thankfully the campaign run on https://publicbenefit.uk/ https://publicbenefit.uk/ actually worked.