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auDA car crash continues as director quits over foreign members

Kevin Murphy, August 7, 2018, Domain Policy

auDA director Tim Connell has quit the board over its decision to admit almost a thousand new members from the industry side of the house.
Connell, the only remaining elected “Demand class” director, said he believes auDA will now be controlled by registrars and the new back-end registry, Afilias.
In his resignation letter (pdf), Connell said: “I fear this potentially hands control of auDA over to industry and could ultimately create the situation where the independent governing body is no longer independent.”
The new member influx, which saw the ranks swell from about 320 to over 1,300 in the space of a few weeks, was largely due to three large registrars and the back-end encouraging their staff to sign up for membership.
One registrar, CrazyDomains owner Dreamscape Networks, now apparently employs almost 40% of auDA’s members.
auDA, which seems to have nudged the companies towards this membership drive, is under pressure from the Australian government to grow and diversify its membership.
Chief critic Josh Rowe, himself a former director, has calculated, based on a non-public member list, that most of the new members are based outside of Australia, a fact alluded to by Connell in his letter.
Rowe and his fellow “Grumpies” used last month’s extraordinary auDA meeting to demand that the new membership applications be rejected on the grounds that the new members are not a part of the Australian internet community that auDA is constitutionally bound to serve.
But auDA chair Chris Leptos responded that they are members of the community by virtue of their employment.
Connell’s primary concern appears to be that the swollen member base is now heavily tilted in favor of the supply-side of the community.
He noted that an AUD 12 million marketing fund distributed to registrars in the wake of the migration to cheaper back-end Afilias could be seen as an attempt to bribe the industry to side with the auDA party line.
Grumpies have accused auDA of “cartel-like” behavior in this regard.
At the special meeting two weeks ago, motions to fire three directors including Leptos (over unrelated disagreements) were rejected due to near-unanimous opposition from the Supply-class members, despite an overall majority of voters supporting their removal.
The new members were not eligible to vote at that meeting, so the Supply-class was considerably smaller.
At the same meeting, Connell revealed that his Demand-class directorship had recently come into question due to the fact that he acted as an affiliate of a registrar.
He said he’d rectified that situation, and Leptos seemed happy with that the situation had been resolved.
Despite this, Connell says in his letter that he no longer feels that information he receives as a director is “accurate or complete”, suggesting continued tensions on the board.
For all these reasons, he said he was resigning immediately.
In a statement, auDA thanked Connell for his service and said a replacement will be sought within three months.
I’ve actually lost count of how many auDA directors have quit recently. I’ve reported on at least five, including the last chair, since I started covering the unrest there a little over a year ago.