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That's astonishing, the amount of compensation the board thought they could pay themselves. The technical and regulatory complexity of running a domain registra

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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Their idea probably was that if the company wasn’t going to grow, why would it need an expensive board member such as themselves?
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Sounds like an interesting chicken-or-egg question for a business ethics textbook.
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      The business world is rife with these kind of situations. When you hire new leadership, how do you signal that you’ve hired top talent? By paying them above median wages. What happens to median wages when every company turns over their leadership every 18 months and pays replacement execs “above median”?
- g_p 6y ago
  > 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. » They had all of their growth and innovation, and couldn't keep their own basic website up (before being posted to HN) [1]. Presumably it was, as you say, a justification. [1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053 https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053
- andrewf 6y ago
  Core infrastructure (domain registration, SSL certs, IP addresses, peering exchanges) mostly need administration and maintenance. But NGOs in this space seem haunted by a compulsion to do more. It's interesting - and possibly correct - that the leadership projected their own feelings onto the staff here. They're basically throwing their hands up and saying "but that's boring!" Handing humans a revenue stream and a dictate to "keep a steady hand on the tiller" seems prone to the same failure mode as asking a proverbial AI to "just make us some paperclips".
  - flemhans 6y ago
    It's the same with every TLD. They invent processes, paperwork, registrar meetings, weird EPP extensions, user verification, arbitration procedures, hearings, just to make themselves useful and have a reason for the annual payments.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      The bureaucracy exists to increase the bureaucracy.
- Centigonal 6y ago
  If they wanted the business to grow, perhaps reinvesting the multiple millions of dollars they were paying themselves back into expanding the business would have been a prudent choice. You pay yourself in excess when you think your business's ROIC will be poor/risky or your tenure will be short. These folks are either not very smart or just hypocrites.
hinkley 6y ago
> Both points on the campaign website link to articles published by The Register in which we outlined how Haworth had theatrically shutdown the only means of independent communication between members – an online forum – while he was giving a speech at its annual general meeting, and how Haworth had accused us of peddling “fake news” when we reported on a flawed proposition to make millions of valuable .uk domains available to Nominet members instead of the general public (our article was entirely correct.) Oh, they mad.
ljm 6y ago
It's disappointing that there'll be basically no real consequence for this for anyone involved. They got 70% over 4 years, this Haworth got 30% in the last year. They're just rotating one group of people who leeched out their worth to replace them with some others who will do the same.
g_p 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. It's ironic that for a company that regards itself as critical infrastructure, their homepage/CMS didn't seem able to handle the traffic from people checking the EGM result. [1] (an hour before being posted to HN) For a registrar that makes the case it is that important, it does seem like they ought to (for that executive compensation) have a website that can handle that level of traffic... [1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053 https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053
- walrus01 6y ago
  for something with a many million pound budget, I bet I could quite effectively cache-proxy their CMS with a budget of $20,000 and four high powered 1U servers running a very vanilla nginx https setup. Probably fast enough to serve >50Gbps of outbound traffic of the mostly static content.

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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tinus_hn 6y ago
Their idea probably was that if the company wasn’t going to grow, why would it need an expensive board member such as themselves?
- walrus01 6y ago
  Sounds like an interesting chicken-or-egg question for a business ethics textbook.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    The business world is rife with these kind of situations. When you hire new leadership, how do you signal that you’ve hired top talent? By paying them above median wages. What happens to median wages when every company turns over their leadership every 18 months and pays replacement execs “above median”?
g_p 6y ago
> 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. » They had all of their growth and innovation, and couldn't keep their own basic website up (before being posted to HN) [1]. Presumably it was, as you say, a justification. [1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053 https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053
andrewf 6y ago
Core infrastructure (domain registration, SSL certs, IP addresses, peering exchanges) mostly need administration and maintenance. But NGOs in this space seem haunted by a compulsion to do more. It's interesting - and possibly correct - that the leadership projected their own feelings onto the staff here. They're basically throwing their hands up and saying "but that's boring!" Handing humans a revenue stream and a dictate to "keep a steady hand on the tiller" seems prone to the same failure mode as asking a proverbial AI to "just make us some paperclips".
- flemhans 6y ago
  It's the same with every TLD. They invent processes, paperwork, registrar meetings, weird EPP extensions, user verification, arbitration procedures, hearings, just to make themselves useful and have a reason for the annual payments.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    The bureaucracy exists to increase the bureaucracy.
Centigonal 6y ago
If they wanted the business to grow, perhaps reinvesting the multiple millions of dollars they were paying themselves back into expanding the business would have been a prudent choice. You pay yourself in excess when you think your business's ROIC will be poor/risky or your tenure will be short. These folks are either not very smart or just hypocrites.

hinkley 6y ago

> Both points on the campaign website link to articles published by The Register in which we outlined how Haworth had theatrically shutdown the only means of independent communication between members – an online forum – while he was giving a speech at its annual general meeting, and how Haworth had accused us of peddling “fake news” when we reported on a flawed proposition to make millions of valuable .uk domains available to Nominet members instead of the general public (our article was entirely correct.) Oh, they mad.

ljm 6y ago

It's disappointing that there'll be basically no real consequence for this for anyone involved. They got 70% over 4 years, this Haworth got 30% in the last year. They're just rotating one group of people who leeched out their worth to replace them with some others who will do the same.

g_p 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. It's ironic that for a company that regards itself as critical infrastructure, their homepage/CMS didn't seem able to handle the traffic from people checking the EGM result. [1] (an hour before being posted to HN) For a registrar that makes the case it is that important, it does seem like they ought to (for that executive compensation) have a website that can handle that level of traffic... [1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053 https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053

walrus01 6y ago
for something with a many million pound budget, I bet I could quite effectively cache-proxy their CMS with a budget of $20,000 and four high powered 1U servers running a very vanilla nginx https setup. Probably fast enough to serve >50Gbps of outbound traffic of the mostly static content.