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McCarthy wins Nominet director election

Kevin Murphy, October 5, 2022, 11:29:31 (UTC), Domain Registries

Kieren McCarthy, the former reporter who has spent much of his career bashing .uk registry Nominet in the pages of The Register, has been elected to its board of directors following a sometimes fractious campaign.

He won despite placing second to lawyer Jim Davies in the first round of voting, which saw CentralNic lawyer Volker Greimann eliminated. The vast majority of Greimann’s votes transferred to McCarthy in the second round. The results can be found here (pdf).

Turnout was a miserable 15.1%, almost 10 percentage points lower than it was in last year’s non-executive director election.

McCarthy is executive director of the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the non-profit set up by .xxx registry ICM to hack around ICANN’s rules and give the illusion of legitimacy in the 2003 “sponsored” gTLD application round.

As such, he’s paid indirectly by GoDaddy, ICM’s current owner, which can’t have hurt his prospects in the election but GoDaddy says it did not vote in the election. Under Nominet’s controversial voting system, larger registrars get more votes, capped at 3% of the total.

With McCarthy standing on a platform of increased transparency, some Nominet members had pointed out the irony that IFFOR hadn’t published any board minutes in several years. He also faced criticism for using Nominet’s logo, apparently without permission, in his election mailshots.

McCarthy replaces Anne Taylor, whose three-year term is up.



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Comments (5)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    Yay! Nominet budget is going to pay money owed by Kieren and I will finally collect!

  2. Kurt Pritz says:

    This is great news. Kieren has worked tirelessly for increased transparency and accountability of all organisations across the DNS. Congratulations to Kieren.

    • Jim Davies says:

      IFFOR hasn’t published any AGM minutes since 2018 and no updates on its website in about a year. It’s spent $0 on grants and its community, despite receiving more than $2.5 million from .xxx Not much transparency, apart from its statutory tax returns.

  3. James Bladel says:

    For clarification, GoDaddy abstained from voting for a NED candidate in the most recent election.

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