Nominet dodges millions in member refunds
Nominet UK has managed to avoid having to pay out millions in refunds to its registrars and members after a lawsuit filed by one member was dismissed by a British court.
A spokesperson for the .uk registry said this statement was circulated among members today:
The claim made by a Nominet member for a refund of fees paid for membership was dismissed by the Court in Cardiff on 21 May. Costs will be determined later. We do not have the written court order yet – we will wait for that before commenting further.
The member in question is Curon Davies, represented by lawyer Jim Davies, a long-time critic of Nominet, who had claimed that the registry had been violating its own rules by charging membership fees for over a quarter of a century.
Davies and others from the WeightedVoting.uk campaign obtained an opinion from a top lawyer in 2022, stating that Nominet’s Articles have not permitted it to collect membership fees since 1997, not long after it was founded.
With first-year fees of £400 and annual renewals of £100, that would have meant Nominet obtained many millions of GBP that it had no right to, this opinion said, though the statute of limitations would have limited its exposure to about £1.5 million.
Jim Davies said he disagreed with the judge’s ruling, saying “Nominet won on a narrow issue of how its articles should be interpreted”. He added in a statement that an appeal is planned:
We are preparing an application to appeal against the judge’s ruling, which seems to reward Nominet’s board for their ongoing failure to do what is required of them under the company’s governance documents. We respectfully disagree with the Judge’s conclusion on that point. We believe it is wrong in law and is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the articles.
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