Three candidates stand for Nominet board

Nominet has revealed the three candidates who will stand for election for a non-executive directorship on its board this year.

The candidates are Thomas Rickert, David Thornton and Steve Wright.

German lawyer Rickert is a familiar face in ICANN policy-making circles, currently as a representative of the ISPs constituency on the GNSO Council. He’s head of domains policy at German trade group eco.

Domain investor Thornton, has been on the Nomninet board as a NED before. He stood for reelection in 2021 but received less than 6% of the first-round votes and was beaten by Simon Blackler and Ashley La Bolle.

Wright is COO of hosting company Redcentric, which he joined earlier this year after it acquired his own hosting firm, according to his socials.

Their candidate statements are hidden behind a Nominet membership paywall.

Nominet said two other candidates were nominated but one pulled out — presumably incumbent Phil Buckingham, who has left for personal reasons — and other other failed to provide enough information for Nominet’s security screening.

“As Nominet is entrusted with managing critical internet infrastructure, these checks are important and all directors who join the company are asked to complete them,” the company said.

Candidates do not have to be members, but they do have to be nominated by two members to be eligible. The ballot, in which members get a number of votes dependent on how many domains they manage, will be held in September.

Nominet admits membership fees mistake

Nominet has told DI it made an honest mistake when it made claims about its historical membership fees, after a pressure campaign accused the .uk registry of “misleading” its members.

The company is currently holding a public consultation on sweeping revisions to its Articles of Association, but the WeightedVoting.uk campaign, led by lawyer Jim Davies, reckons that Nominet has been violating its current Articles for years.

WeightedVoting supporters believe Nominet has been unlawfully receiving millions of pounds of membership fees for the last 25 years. This week, Davies accused the company’s leadership of either being ignorant of Nominet’s own history or “deliberately misleading” members by claiming it “has always had a flat membership fee for all Members”.

Today, about 2,500 members pay a £500 joining fee and annual renewals of £100. Their voting rights are calculated based on how many domains under management they have, using a formula so complex even Nominet sometimes gets it wrong.

The system, while it caps the amount of influence any one member may have, means that the larger registrars such as GoDaddy and Tucows have more votes when it comes to things like electing directors.

Last year, Davies, with the backing of a KC and other members, claimed that this system was not envisaged under Nominet’s Articles of Association, which date back to 1996, and that collecting a flat membership fee was therefore illegal, which Nominet has denied.

WeightedVoting claims Nominet is instead supposed to have a tiered membership system where members get more votes by paying higher membership fees. An archived page from Nominet’s web site seems to support this, but Nominet chair Andy Green allegedly told members recently that this system was never actually implememnted.

“Tiered subscriptions were clearly intended by those who established Nominet and that is reflected in the Articles,” Davies wrote yesterday. “Those Articles have not been followed since 1997. Nominet is breaking the law by doing so. It also has no power to charge subscriptions at present”

Now Davies says members have found an old Usenet* post from 1996 in which a member of the fledgling registry explains how his company, pioneering dial-up ISP Demon Internet, had just paid the maximum £5,000 for 10 votes.

Presented with this new evidence, a Nominet spokesperson told DI:

Members pointed out that we made a mistake in a document supporting the consultation to update our articles of association, as we bring them in line with current practice.

We initially believed that tiered membership fees had never been implemented by Nominet. It has been our long-standing practice to charge a flat fee for all members regardless of their size. Having been made aware that some members paid more in the very early days – from incorporation in 1996 to 1997 – we are correcting the document. Our data retention policies mean that we do not have records of invoices from so long ago. This was an error, and not an attempt to mislead anybody.

We recognise our articles of association are complex and in need of updating, hence the very process to get members involved in this consultation.

Iain Mitchell KC, who wrote a legal opinion for WeightedVoting, reckons Nominet could be on the hook for £1.5 million if it is forced to refund fees, with statutes of limitations limiting liability to the last six years.

(*For the kids… Usenet is a decentralized system of text discussion groups that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Think Reddit, but made of glowing green text on monochrome Unix terminals like in The Matrix or something. It still exists, but the learning curve required to use it probably isn’t worth the effort.)

Government to regulate UK-related domain names

The UK government is to trigger a law that would allow it to take control of .uk, .wales, .cymru, .scot and .london if their registries get thoroughly abused and they fail to do anything about it.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said today it is to activate (or “commence”) the parts of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 that give it the power to appoint a new manager for any “UK-related” TLDs.

DSIT would only be able to exercise these powers if the registry in question had let DNS abuse or cybersquatting run amok and failed to follow government orders to fix it. I don’t believe any of the affected registries are currently in such a state.

The government has now launched a consultation, running until the end of August, to get industry and public feedback on its definitions of abuse and what it called “unfair domain use”, meaning cybersquatting.

Nominet, which runs .uk, .wales and .cymru, said in a statement:

The proposed prescribed requirements are consistent with Nominet’s current voluntary procedures, which Government has made clear it believes Nominet operates in a perfectly satisfactory manner. As the Government has had a reserve power to “step in” ever since the DEA was introduced, the purpose of the new provisions is to give Government a formal mechanism to do so, should it ever be required. Our understanding is that Government is enacting these provisions now to ensure the UK meets international best practice on governance of country code top-level domains in line with key global trading partners and future global trading commitments.

Based on my first read, I expect registries and registrars will think it looks generally pretty palatable. It seems DSIT has followed ICANN and the industry’s lead in terms of what qualifies as abuse, and Nominet said in a statement tonight that all three affected registries have been meeting with DSIT to craft the consultation.

Domain investors may take issue with the precise wording of the cybersquatting definition, however.

The definitions of abuse cover the industry standard five bases: malware, phishing, botnets, pharming and spam (insofar as it facilitates any of the other four) and cybersquatting is defined thus:

the pre-emptive, bad faith registration of trade marks as domain names by third parties who do not possess rights in such names. This includes ‘typosquatting’, when an end user takes advantage of common misspellings made by Internet users who are looking for a particular site or a particular provider of goods or services, in order to obtain some benefit.

Domainers will notice the document talks about “bad faith registration”, whereas UDRP talks about bad faith “registration and use”, which is sometimes an important edge-case distinction in cybersquatting disputes. Nominet’s DRS uses bad faith registration “or” use.

Where the consultation gets vague, and the potential for debate arises, is when it talks in general, high-level terms about how dispute resolution procedures should be designed.

Failure to deal with child sexual abuse material, as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in an affected TLD could also result in the government appointing a new registry.

The four gTLDs affected by the legislation all are considered geographic under ICANN rules and had to secure local government support when they applied for their strings. ICANN has a contractual right to terminate them if that government says so.

After the consultation is complete, DSIT intends to make its definitions law through secondary legislation.

This post was updated shortly after publication to add Nominet comments.

Buckingham leaves Nominet’s board early

Nominet director Phil Buckingham has stepped down from Nominet’s board of directors just a few months before his seat comes up for reelection.

Nominet said he was leaving the board for personal reasons immediately.

He was a member-elected non-executive director approaching the end of a three-year term. He will not stand for reelection, Nominet said.

The company, which runs .uk, opened up the seat for nominations in April and will hold a vote in September.

Identity Digital is gobbling up Verisign’s back-end business

Verisign appears to be getting out of the new gTLD back-end registry services business, with Identity Digital taking over most of its dot-brand contracts.

Since 2018, over 80 gTLDs have moved from Verisign’s back-end to a competitor or have been removed from the DNS altogether. Over the same period, it hasn’t won any business from any of its rivals, according to data I’ve compiled.

Over the last few months about 30 new gTLDs have moved their technical back-end from Verisign to competitors, all but two to Identity Digital. Nominet and CIRA picked up a gTLD deal each.

Verisign tells me it’s not interested in providing new gTLD back-end services any more. A Verisign spokesperson said in an email:

In the case of the back-end services we provide to new gTLDs, we continually evaluate our business objectives and a few years ago, we decided that we would not be renewing our current new gTLD registry services customers and that we would help them transition before their contracts expired if they wished.

gTLDs moving home recently include .bosch, .crown, .chanel, .next, .nikon, .juniper and .fidelity.

Given the sheer number of gTLDs going to Identity Digital, it appears that there may be a side deal between the two registries to recommend migration to ID, but both companies declined to comment on that suggestion.

In 2012, Verisign had signed on to be the back-end for 220 new gTLDs, mostly dot-brands. Not all of those made it through the application process, but today my database has the company as RSP-of-record for fewer than 80 2012-round labels.

The company was said to be among the priciest option for dot-brands, trading on decades of .com uptime prestige, but the need for an RSP with 150 million domains under management is debatable when your gTLD is essentially just parked.

And for Verisign, the dot-brand business is not material to revenues and probably not especially profitable, at least when compared to the vast amounts of cash .com effortlessly generates.

In 2021, Verisign lost its deal to manage .tv to GoDaddy, after it declined to compete presumably due to the anticipated lower profit margins.

Nominet looking for another director

.uk registry Nominet has opened up its 2023 elections for a new non-executive director.

The company is looking for a NED able to serve a three-year term starting at the AGM in the fourth quarter.

Director Phil Buckingham’s current three-year term is up in September.

You don’t need to be a Nominet member to apply, but you do need to be nominated and seconded by members.

The deadline for nominations is June 2 and the voting opens in September.

Elections in previous years have proved controversial, with members unhappy about the company’s direction for some time.

One in six .au domains is a 2LD

The .au ccTLD had over 700,000 direct second-level registrations at the end of 2022, according to registry auDA.

In its annual report (pdf) published this week, auDA said it had over 716,000 2LD regs. The second level space was opened up in March last year with a six-month grandfathering period.

It had 4,160,209 domains overall at the end of December, so roughly one in six .au regs was a 2LD.

In the comparable .uk liberalization, which had a five-year grandfathering period, at its peak in 2019 roughly one in four names was a 2LD. Today, it’s more like one in 10.

Whether .au will follow the same trend remains to be seen.

Nominet blew six figures vanity-publishing ex-CEO’s book

Nominet spent £135,000 to publish an upcoming book by a CEO who has since been kicked out, to promote a business it has since divested, it has emerged.

Thoughts from the Big Chair: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation, by Russell Haworth, is due to be published in April, after Nominet paid the hefty sum to publisher Forbes.

Haworth quit the company almost two years ago, just hours before he could be forced out in a member mutiny, but the publishing deal evidently pre-dates that chaotic period for the .uk registry by about a year.

Nominet chair Andy Green, who was installed months later as part of a broad institutional reform package, told members in late December that he was surprised to discover Haworth was going ahead with publication.

It was designed to help promote the company’s “Cyber business” in the US, but since that loss-making business has since been abandoned, the assets sold off for a dollar, the book currently has “no value to Nominet”, Green told members.

Judging by the Amazon blurb, it appears the focus of the book is now “digital leadership”, and one assumes it’s more about building the former CEO’s personal brand at Nominet’s expense.

On his LinkedIn page, Haworth said last month he decided to write the book during the Covid-19 pandemic and that it’s “written for senior execs and board members of meduim sized businesses who are looking to navigate their transformation journey, and what they should consider”.

Haworth is currently the UK CEO of Sweden-based Byggfakta Group, which makes software for the construction industry.

There’s no chance of getting the money back because there’s been no breach of contract, Green told members. Haworth owns all rights and liabilities to the book, so Nominet is not on the hook to buy “significant quantities” of it, he said.

Green added that he would be reluctant to approve such a deal had he been at the helm and was not aware of it until recently.

McCarthy wins Nominet director election

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.

Nominet “gaslighting” members over fees, candidate claims

Nominet has been accused of “gaslighting” its members over the issue of whether its membership fees are lawful by one of its non-executive director candidates.

Jim Davies is one of four signatories of the latest missive from the WeightedVoting.uk campaign, which is trying to get Nominet to address both its voting system and the fees it charges members.

Following the news last week that lawyer Ian Mitchell KC, hired by the campaign, had concluded that Nominet’s Articles haven’t technically allowed it to charge membership fees for the last 25 years, the registry issued a statement saying its own legal advice disagreed.

“That advice identifies significant flaws in the [Mitchell] advice that has been published. We remain confident in the legality of Nominet’s long-standing voting and membership arrangements,” Nominet told us last week, while declining to provide that advice.

It seems the same statement was provided to Nominet members, though only WeightedVoting was provided the new opinion.

Now WeightedVoting has published Nominet’s opinion, written by Andrew Thornton KC, which concludes that the weighted voting system Nominet uses — in which bigger registrars get more votes — is “entirely lawful and enforceable”.

What Thornton’s opinion does not address is the membership fees problem, despite Nominet’s suggestion that it covers both issues.

Now Davies and his supporters have written to Nominet’s current non-executive directors, asking again for the company’s annual general meeting, still apparently due to go ahead on Thursday, to be delayed.

They call Nominet’s statement “manifestly false” and call for the NEDs to exercise their legal duties or face “personal liability”.

Davies is one of three candidates to fill a vacating NED seat at the AGM this week when the results of a recently concluded election are announced.

His rivals are former reporter Kieren McCarthy and CentralNic lawyer Volker Greimann.