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Nominet names directors after tight election

Kevin Murphy, October 17, 2024, Domain Registries

Ashley La Bolle and Rex Wickham have been named Nominet non-executive directors after an election that saw the top three candidates finish with very close numbers.

Nominet said La Bolle, who works for Tucows, and Wickham, who works for 2020Media, were elected after three rounds of votes and took their seats immediately at the company’s AGM yesterday.

La Bolle was an incumbent, having been originally elected three years ago amid one of the most fractious periods in Nominet’s history.

Wickham replaces Simon Blackler, who won his seat in 2021 as lead of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which managed to oust key members of management and board and force Nominet to refocus its business the same year. He did not stand for reelection.

Voting results shared by the company show that Rob Golding of Astutium came a close third in the race, receiving a third-round total of 272,213 votes, compared to Wickham’s 287,794 and La Bolle’s 297,258.

Turnout was 10.6%, the lowest level in the last few years, perhaps indicating a lack of displeasure with Nominet’s current direction.

UK and Israel cut ICANN funding

Kevin Murphy, October 1, 2024, Domain Registries

The ccTLD registries for UK and Israel cut their funding to ICANN by the largest amounts in the Org’s last financial year, according to the latest numbers.

ICANN received mostly voluntary ccTLD contributions totaling $2,135,937 in its fiscal 2024, which ended June 30, according to its report, which was published (pdf) a couple weeks ago. That’s down $80,302 from the $2,216,240 it received in FY23.

The biggest single reason for the decline is that Nominet, the .uk registry, slashed its contribution from its usual $225,000 tribute by $75,000 to $150,000 in FY24.

Under ICANN guidelines (pdf) for ccTLDs, registries with over five million domains under management should contribute the maximum $225,000 a year. While .uk has been in decline for a while, it still has well over 10 million DUM.

But Nominet was the only ccTLD still paying the $225,000. All the other ccTLDs with over five million domains were already paying substantially less.

The Netherlands reduced its contribution from $225,000 to $180,000 in FY23. Germany has not given ICANN more than $130,000 a year in the last five years. China always pays $45,000. Brazil pays $100,000.

Nick Wenban-Smith, Nominet’s general counsel told us: “Our relationship with ICANN has not changed. We are a long-standing supporter of the organisation in many ways, lending our resources to policy work and other community efforts alongside our annual financial contribution.”

Israel is the second big funding-cutter in the latest report. It had been giving the recommended $15,000 for its 250,000+ domains, but reduced that to just $5,000 in FY24, despite its DUM being up slightly over the period.

Registries from nine territories that contributed $1,000 or less every year from FY20 to FY23 did not contribute at all in FY24. These include Nigeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Malawi, Guernsey, Jersey, Saint Lucia, Tokelau, and the US Virgin Islands.

The lack of any money from Tokelau’s .tk is expected given the death of the registry. Jersey and Guernsey are perhaps more surprising, given the registries are run by a former ICANN director.

A handful of other ccTLDs from small territories that have only sporadically given in the past did not contribute in FY24.

Fourteen registries contributed more in FY24 than they did in FY23, but the difference amounted to just $13,000 extra cash in ICANN’s coffers. South Africa, Slovenia, Vietnam, Tanzania, and Mongolia all paid $1,000 or more over FY23.

Russia, which stopped providing funding in FY23 despite its almost six million DUM, also did not give any money in FY24.

Microsoft switches two gTLDs from GoDaddy to Nominet

Kevin Murphy, September 2, 2024, Domain Registries

Microsoft has moved two of its branded gTLDs from GoDaddy’s registry back-end to Nominet’s.

Records show that .skype and .office both recently made the switch.

Microsoft had already moved six TLDs — .azure, .bing, .hotmail, .microsoft, .windows and .xbox — from Verisign to Nominet about a year ago, and .skype and .office mean its whole collection is now on Nominet’s service.

While .office isn’t technically a dot-brand because it does not have a Spec13 exemption in its ICANN contract, it is in use — you can log in to your email and other services, at least for now, via www.office.

.skype, meanwhile, has a handful of domains that work as redirects to skype.com.

No .uk price hikes despite tumbling sales

Nominet said today that it has no plans to raise the price of .uk domains, even as registration volumes continue to sink and profits tumbled.

The registry said in its annual report that its net loss for the year ended March 31 was £6 million ($7.7 million), compared to £3.9 million ($5 million) in fiscal 2023, on revenue up £2.3 million ($3 million) to £56.4 million ($72.4 million).

The increase in revenue was due to its non-domains Cyber business, which was up by £2.7 million, offsetting a £400,000 decrease in domains revenue that was due to a 300,000 decline in domains under management.

Domains brought in £41.1 million at the top line during the period, but profit dropped from £14.8 million in 2023 to £9.8 million.

Nominet also lost a Protective DNS contract with the UK government during the year, which led to 40 layoffs and 19 employees being reassigned, but said the setbacks will not lead to price hikes.

“Even with the loss of the UK PDNS contract, and lower domain name renewals indicative of a maturing market, we see no immediate need to increase pricing, but we will continue to regularly review,” chair Andy Green and CEO Paul Fletcher said in the report.

.uk names currently cost £3.90 per year, with the last price increase happening in 2020.

Fletcher and CFO Carolyn Bedford both received hefty bonuses during the year, amounting to an extra £180,000 for Fletcher on top of his £304,500 base salary and an extra £94,557 for Bedford to add to her £190,000 base.

The company confirmed in its report that it plans to participate in the next new gTLD application round in 2026 as a back-end registry services provider, saying it expects the market to be very competitive.

Nominet names director hopefuls

Kevin Murphy, July 22, 2024, Domain Policy

Nominet has named the five people who have put themselves forward for two seats on its board of directors. While there are familiar faces, there are also notable absences.

Ashley La Bolle of Tucows is defending her non-executive director seat and standing for her second term, but fellow NED Simon Blackler, famously of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, is not.

PublicBenefit.uk resulted in a boardroom bloodbath at Nominet in 2021 and a change of focus for the .uk registry under new management.

Jim Davies, who threatened legal action after being excluded from the 2023 election, is also not on the list.

Rex Wickham of TwentyTwentyMedia, who sits on Nominet’s .UK Registry Advisory Council, is also on the list, along with Rob Golding, who has previously stood unsuccessfully for a NED seat.

Thomas Mangin and David Ward, neither of whom I believe have been candidates in Nominet elections before, round off the list.

Candidates’ election statements appear to be available to members only.

Nominet members get to vote, weighted according to how many .uk domains they manage, from September 23, and the new NEDs take their seats at the company’s AGM the following month.

Four more gTLDs in emergency measures

ICANN has thrown four more gTLDs into the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, presumably as a prelude to terminating their registry’s contracts in a few weeks.

Asia Green IT System’s .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) are all going EBERO, meaning Nominet will take over their operation on ICANN’s behalf.

Not that they need much operation, given that all four, which all connect in some way to Iran and Iranian culture, were unlaunched and dormant, with no third-party registrations.

The four TLDs, along with AGIT’s .nowruz, which went into EBERO last week, had been running on CoCCA’s back-end, but it sounds rather like the registry forgot to pay its bills, causing CoCCA to disable its services.

That led to functions such as Whois going offline, triggering a breach of the ICANN Registry Agreement. A day of Whois downtime in one week gives ICANN grounds to get Nominet involved and move towards termination.

A breach notice issued a couple weeks ago gave AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk termination. That escalation now appears inevitable.

AGIT almost got to run .islam and .halal, but had its applications rejected after protests from governments of Muslim-majority country. Somehow, .shia did not receive the same outcry.

ICANN takes over gTLD after Whois failures

ICANN has swooped to take over operation of a new gTLD after it missed its strict thresholds for Whois availability.

.nowruz, originally operated by Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System, is now in the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, meaning its essential functions will be carried out by Nominet.

The gTLD is the Latinized version of the word for the Persian new year holiday. It has barely a dozen domains under management and is the only one of AgitSys’s five gTLDs with any registrations.

The company’s other gTLDs — .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) — were also all found to have breached their registry agreements, but as they have no third-party domains where was no need for the EBERO, ICANN said.

The takeover follows a rapidly issued notice last week, in which ICANN Compliance accused AgitSys of a range of breaches of contract.

It seems AGIT went into breach with ICANN after its back-end provider, CoCCA, terminated its contract after a “breach” earlier this year. CoCCA said it had been turning off services ever since the contract ended.

.nowruz becomes the third gTLD from the 2012 round to go into emergency measures, the others being .desi and .wed, which went EBERO seven years ago.

ICANN said it planned to auction off .wed in 2021, but nothing has come of that plan yet.

Two seats up for grabs on Nominet board

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2024, Domain Registries

The .uk registry, Nominet, has opened up its call for nominations for its 2024 non-executive director elections.

There are two seats up for grabs this year, currently occupied by Simon Blackler of Krystal Hosting and Ashley La Bolle of Tucows, both of whom were originally elected in 2021 and are eligible for reelection if they choose to stand again.

Blackler, you may recall, was the instigator of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which resulted in a boardroom bloodbath three years ago.

The seats represent half of the member-elected NEDs on Nominet’s board.

Non-members are eligible for nomination but only members may nominate and vote. Votes are weighted so the members with the most domains under management get the most votes, albeit with a cap to avoid capture by the largest players.

The deadline for nominations is July 7, and the vote takes place in September. Elections have historically reliably highlighted divisions in the .uk community.

Up to 70 jobs on the line at Nominet as .uk regs dwindle

Kevin Murphy, March 13, 2024, Domain Registries

Nominet plans to lay off as many as 70 employees to cut costs, and is preparing for a .uk price increase, after years of dwindling domain registrations and the loss of a major government contract.

CEO Paul Fletcher told members yesterday that it won’t be providing the UK government with its Protective DNS recursive DNS service, PDNS, after its contract ends later this year. He implied that the government has selected a cheaper competitor to replace it, without giving details.

The deal was with the UK National Cyber Security Centre, and saw Nominet resolve half a trillion DNS queries a year for central government and other public services.

Nominet had been banking on this “cyber” business to bolster revenue in the face of “static or reduced demand for domains”, but the contract loss means some serious belt-tightening is in order, Fletcher indicated.

In its last financial year, Nominet said its cyber business had revenue of £12.6 million but had a loss of £2.4 million

“The changes that we are proposing to give us a sustainable cost base mean that up to 70 of our current roles could be made redundant,” he told members in an email. “While this would be partially offset by some redeployment opportunities, our overall headcount will reduce.”

He added that members should expect the price of .uk domains to increase in future, without giving a timetable.

“Our pricing will remain at current level of £3.90 until at least the end of the year, extending the freeze in place since 2021,” he wrote, but added that lower volume means “prices cannot be held at the level set in January 2020 indefinitely.”

Nominet had 10,688,932 .uk domains under management at the end of January, down from 11,045,559 a year earlier (a loss of almost a thousand domains a day) and its 2019 peak of 13,348,378.

Fletcher also delivered the news that one of its longest-serving staffers, registry managing director Eleanor Bradley, will leave the company later this year.

Finally, he said the company has successfully challenged a default court judgment (pdf) ordering it to repay a member’s subscription fees, a ruling that had been put forward as proof that Nominet has been breaking the law by charging membership fees for the last quarter-century.

Fletcher said the judgment came because Nominet had no idea it had been sued, adding: “On 31 January, we successfully applied to have the default judgment set aside in the County Court, having made every effort to avoid unnecessary, costly and time-consuming court proceedings. This ruling, which the claimant is appealing, allows us to defend the original claim.”

The lawsuit came as part of a campaign operated at WeightedVoting.uk that seeks to prove Nominet’s membership and voting structure is illegal.

Police .uk domain takedowns dive in 2023

Kevin Murphy, February 29, 2024, Domain Registries

The number of .uk domain names taken down as a result of requests from law enforcement shrank substantially last year, according to the latest stats from Nominet.

The registry said today that it suspended 1,193 domains in the 12 months to October 31, down from 2,106 in the previous period. It’s a record low since Nominet started tracking the data, for the second year in a row.

As usual, alleged intellectual property violations were the biggest cause of action. The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit had 717 names taken down, with the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau suspending 321 and the Financial Conduct Authority 116.

While police takedowns were low, domains suspended by Nominet’s proactive Domain Watch anti-phishing technology were up about 20%, from 5,005 to 5,911. Nominet said this is because the tech, which flags possible phishing domains for human review at point of registration, is getting better.

The number of domains suspended because they appeared on threat feeds doubled, from 1,108 in the 2022 period to 2,230 last year, the company said.

Cybersquatting cases in .uk have also been declining, Nominet reported earlier this month.

While correlation does not equal causation, it might be worth noting that .uk registrations overall have been on the decline for some time. There were 10.68 million .uk domains at the end of January, down from 11.04 million a year earlier.