Nominet announces that four directors have been removed | Hacker News Reader

Nominet announces that four directors have been removed

nominet.uk

105 pointsblibble39 comments

Some earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26191570

That's astonishing, the amount of compensation the board thought they could pay themselves. The technical and regulatory complexity of running a domain registrar do not warrant compensation of such absurd figures.

People who have 20 years of experience running core routers and backbone operations at globe-spanning international transit and transport ISPs that have thousands of POPs don't get paid anywhere near that figure. The complexity of an ISP on the scale of Telia, Level3 or NTT is far beyond a top level domain operator.

"Those supporting the vote are also unhappy at compensation paid to senior management. The website points to a 38 per cent drop in operating profit between 2016 and 2020, while at the same time the pay of the top three directors, who also sit on Nominet’s board, jumped 70 per cent, from £1m to £1.7m total. Last year, Haworth received a 30 per cent pay rise, bringing his annual compensation to £593,000."

https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/31/nominet_board_vote/

They didn't think they were in charge of running a domain registrar.

They thought they were in charge of running a shiny business that was in the process of transforming away from being principally a domain registrar, in the name of growth. The CEO was a mergers and acquisition specialist.

You can find their stated reasons for believing that growth was vital here: https://www.nominet.uk/the-case-for-growth/

« Without growth, we can’t innovate, and innovation is essential if we are to be ready for new technologies and emerging threats.

Without growth and innovation, we can’t keep our vital staff who connect more than 10 million .UK domains and maintain our service without disruption or downtime. »

I don't know whether they really believed these theories, or whether they really think of growth as an end in itself and were reaching for justifications, but the latter seems more likely to me.

It's not obvious it was conscious. It's an endemic problem in British business culture, and there are obvious rewards for conforming.

People who do "growth" and "strategy" invariably seem to believe they're worth the big money, even if they're actually harming their organisations and lowering their effectiveness and survival prospects.

If they're as good as they think they are they should have no trouble selling their innovation elsewhere.

Their idea probably was that if the company wasn’t going to grow, why would it need an expensive board member such as themselves?

Sounds like an interesting chicken-or-egg question for a business ethics textbook.

The business world is rife with these kind of situations. When you hire new leadership, how do you signal that you’ve hired top talent? By paying them above median wages. What happens to median wages when every company turns over their leadership every 18 months and pays replacement execs “above median”?

> Without growth and innovation, we can’t keep our vital staff who connect more than 10 million .UK domains and maintain our service without disruption or downtime. »

They had all of their growth and innovation, and couldn't keep their own basic website up (before being posted to HN) [1].

Presumably it was, as you say, a justification.

[1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053

Core infrastructure (domain registration, SSL certs, IP addresses, peering exchanges) mostly need administration and maintenance. But NGOs in this space seem haunted by a compulsion to do more. It's interesting - and possibly correct - that the leadership projected their own feelings onto the staff here. They're basically throwing their hands up and saying "but that's boring!"

Handing humans a revenue stream and a dictate to "keep a steady hand on the tiller" seems prone to the same failure mode as asking a proverbial AI to "just make us some paperclips".

It's the same with every TLD. They invent processes, paperwork, registrar meetings, weird EPP extensions, user verification, arbitration procedures, hearings, just to make themselves useful and have a reason for the annual payments.

The bureaucracy exists to increase the bureaucracy.

If they wanted the business to grow, perhaps reinvesting the multiple millions of dollars they were paying themselves back into expanding the business would have been a prudent choice.

You pay yourself in excess when you think your business's ROIC will be poor/risky or your tenure will be short. These folks are either not very smart or just hypocrites.

> Both points on the campaign website link to articles published by The Register in which we outlined how Haworth had theatrically shutdown the only means of independent communication between members – an online forum – while he was giving a speech at its annual general meeting, and how Haworth had accused us of peddling “fake news” when we reported on a flawed proposition to make millions of valuable .uk domains available to Nominet members instead of the general public (our article was entirely correct.)

Oh, they mad.

It's disappointing that there'll be basically no real consequence for this for anyone involved.

They got 70% over 4 years, this Haworth got 30% in the last year.

They're just rotating one group of people who leeched out their worth to replace them with some others who will do the same.

> That's astonishing, the amount of compensation the board thought they could pay themselves. The technical and regulatory complexity of running a domain registrar do not warrant compensation of such absurd figures.

It's ironic that for a company that regards itself as critical infrastructure, their homepage/CMS didn't seem able to handle the traffic from people checking the EGM result. [1] (an hour before being posted to HN)

For a registrar that makes the case it is that important, it does seem like they ought to (for that executive compensation) have a website that can handle that level of traffic...

[1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053

for something with a many million pound budget, I bet I could quite effectively cache-proxy their CMS with a budget of $20,000 and four high powered 1U servers running a very vanilla nginx https setup. Probably fast enough to serve >50Gbps of outbound traffic of the mostly static content.

I wasn't previously familiar with the background on this, but it got me thinking how incredibly common it is for these types of large, public organizations to eventually become overcome by corruption. There is so much essentially free money flying around that leadership eventually tries to convince themselves that they deserve a bigger slice of some of those millions (or billions). Other prominent examples:

1. ICANN and the whole Public Interest Registry in the US.

2. The well-documented corruption in the International Olympic Committee and many national olympic committees.

3. FIFA, almost too much corruption to name.

I wonder if something could be changed about the mindset when these organizations are set up that could reduce this corruption. That is, instead of pretending from they outset that they exist for the public benefit, accept the reality that with the amount of money that they handle that they have all the incentives to become corrupt and have something like a separate auditor/oversight board with different incentives from the get go.

I dunno, that oversight board sounds like they must work really hard to provide the kind of high standards of oversight we’ve come to expect. They should probably provide a supplementary package of measures to allow for rolling extensions of compliance deadlines for an initially low fee to help fund future oversight and yachts.

Also, a lot of those famously corrupt big bodies like the IOC and FIFA are international organsations. It's not easy to get a majority of the national member organisations, or their governments, to support strong action against corruption.

NGOs, quangos and charities are all corrupt by default. They have no reason not to be corrupt.

IMO these things should either a) be actual businesses, accountable to the market, or b) be actual government agencies, accountable through political mechanisms. When we try to blur the lines we all too often end up with the worst of both worlds. Unfortunately the general public hears "non-profit" and assumes that means an organisation that's more likely to respect their interests, when in fact the reverse is true.

I'm amused that you consider political organisations or businesses any less likely to be corrupt.

Corruption is like gravity, everything rolls downhill unless there's something holding it up.

In a large business it can stay hidden for a long while (especially if it's near to something profitable), but sooner or later someone will find it worth their while to follow the money - at least, there's an incentive for that to happen. For government things are even less reliable, but at least there's an opposition who has an incentive to find problems (also media etc.).

It's important to distinguish between "excessive executive pay" and "corruption" (bribery).

Excessive executive pay is common in private firms, of course, but in that case, the shareholders have some incentive to ask the CEO to take a pay cut and hand the money back to shareholders. As a result, we don't regard it as "corruption" when the CEO convinces the board of directors to raise executive pay. The shareholders may be acting wisely or foolishly, but it's "their money" to waste.

But in public organizations like these, with significant revenues (FIFA and IOC make most of their money from selling broadcasting rights, etc.; Nominet makes their money from domain registration fees), nobody's incentivized to keep executive pay low, but we all find it morally disgusting when they keep a lot of money that "should" have been used to promote the public good.

See also Mozilla's executive leadership. Mozilla makes their money from Google. Mozilla is "supposed" to use that money to continue its mission, ("We're building a better internet, ensurig the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all") but when Mitchell Baker takes home $2.4m in salary, there's nobody with skin in the game to say "no, that money should go back to Mozilla so we can use it to build a better internet."

Your suggestion to set up an auditor/oversight board is what causes the bribery. IOC has an ethics committee, but their skin isn't in the game either, so it's easy to offer them bribes to look the other way, allowing executives and the ethics committee to take their cut.

>Mozilla makes their money from Google. Mozilla is "supposed" to use that money to continue its mission, ("We're building a better internet, ensurig the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all") but when Mitchell Baker takes home $2.4m in salary, there's nobody with skin in the game to say "no, that money should go back to Mozilla so we can use it to build a better internet."

That $2.4 million dollar salary is from 2018, a year when Mozilla made most of it's money from Yahoo. This is relevant as that Yahoo deal saw Mozilla making between 100-250 million dollars more a year than their deals with Google. That is what resulted in the board increasing their pay, and after the following Google deal was far lower many of their executives were forced out.

I'm not saying that Baker was or wasn't overpaid, but people certainly did complain about it. "How can you ask me to donate money when Baker's making six figures?" It came up constantly during Mozilla's layoffs last year.

For better or worse, it just "looks bad" when a non-profit executive makes a seven figure salary. And when people ask "could we set up an ombuds/ethics committee/advisory board to prevent Mozilla from doing this?" The answer is the same: no, that wouldn't really work.

>"How can you ask me to donate money when Baker's making six figures?" It came up constantly during Mozilla's layoffs last year.

The donations are for the foundation, the corporation makes a lot of money off their search engine deal. People often bring these things up as they sound bad, so if you're going to to repeat it add the necessary context and avoid the simple misunderstandings.

>could we set up an ombuds/ethics committee/advisory board to prevent Mozilla from doing this

They have a board that picks the corporation's CEO and sets their salary. I doubt you want the monetary sources to control this board, as that would give Google almost total control.

(sorry it's not the page title but otherwise it's context-less)

more context: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/nominet_board_sacked/

and https://publicbenefit.uk/

Thanks for posting this, was very informative.

I think The Register did a fantastic job in their reporting on this. They clearly skewer the CEO and cronies on the board, but always back it up with clear data and arguments that just emphasize how poorly Nominet was run.

el Reg have covered the sad failings in Nominet for years. The article you linked contains a lot of links to prior coverage and are worth reading if you have some spare time.

Nominet has a monopoly over .uk. They are also the org that were tasked with ENUM for the UK. Back in the day there was a web page on Nominet's website describing how it would revolutionise telephony. Then it vanished. For a laugh I called them and was told that ENUM would never be enabled in the UK and no, I can't set it up myself either - they would not allow the delegation.

I doubt ENUM will ever become a thing. I should explain that ENUM allows people to run their own telephone numbers. Yes we can all do VoIP via email addresses (!) but those normal looking phone numbers can be made to work via ENUM without involving a "provider".

If we could use ENUM then I could register my phone number via DNS. The following is slightly adjusted to avoid my PBX exploding. So 01935 476222 becomes 441935476222. My local town is Yeovil and that has the code 01935 within the UK (so does at least one Sherbourne and a few other bits hereabouts.) The country code for the UK is 44 and the rule here is you drop the leading 0 to make a canonical "international" phone number.

Now, reverse the digits and put dots in between then and stick a suffix on the end and pop it into DNS with a pointer to a PBX or even a single handset that talks VoIP.

This presentation explains it all: https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof8/Daley-ENUM.pdf (lol!)

> At an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on Monday, a single resolution to remove all five passed narrowly [PDF] with 52.7 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 53 per cent of members.

Wow. 53% turnout for something very important and with a limited membership. Why isn't voting compulsory? Vote (or abstain) or lose your membership IMO.

It's sad that most of the domain registries have been overrun by business vultures that aren't even competent enough to grow their core business; selling domains.

I'm unnerved that the vote was so close, but it's undoubtedly the right call. Thanks to all of the Nominet members who voted yes.

Hopefully the remaining board members will appoint the two proposed interim directors and work can start on returning the organisation to its true public benefit roots.

Nominet runs .uk and associated internets stuff. This is quite important stuff for a quite important economy. It is a monopoly for that function and has minimal oversight by stakeholders other than "members" - ISPs, not you and me. You and me seem to have a minimal importance despite being the actual end subjects. My .co.uk website is a subject but I have no say in my country's internet governance. I won't dwell on monarchical parallels here!

Over the last few years Nominet (a non profit in the UK sense) have been accused of inflating Director's salaries and attempting projects outside their remit (which have lost money) - vanity projects.

The governance rules look ridiculous: GoDaddy (large US firm) has more say than many UK ISPs by being a big fat thingie. GD did of course stand up for their customers by abstaining (I may be wrong here by being a day or two out of date)

Thankfully the campaign run on https://publicbenefit.uk/ actually worked.

It was close, but the right decision.

53.5% turnout

For 52.74% Against 47.26%

~ 52% to 48%. The cursed numbers!

For those unfamiliar with the pareidolia / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon regarding that ratio, let me provide a few examples, from earliest to most recent:

https://m.facebook.com/13312631635/posts/the-cursed-52-48-ra...

https://old.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/l6cgha/french_pre...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/lzcfo9/breaking...

The much-criticised CEO announcing his intention to step down yesterday probably took a bit of heat off:

https://twitter.com/Nominet/status/1373674125357674497

Where they ever responsible for .io too?

I hate how I paid for o1.io and their system failed on me. Poorly designed system, and they ignored my attempts to get support. Many weeks later they reverted my transaction with PayPal and eventually announced the domain was 10k pounds. Damn it!

> Where they ever responsible for .io too?

Apparently not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io

All the new TLDs have what's called "premium" domains. These encompass the one word and short domain names, which they will sell for MUCH higher. When they are flagged as premium on the back end, most registrars do a piss poor job of advertising it as such to the customer and will even allow you to go as far as ordering it if it's available, just to refund it after because it's actually a premium domain and they don't properly support the registration of them directly.

.io is not one of the "new" gTLDs, though, it's a ccTLD just like .uk

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