Scrutiny? We've heard of it. Dot-UK supremo Nominet goes dark The operator of the .uk top-level domain, Nominet, has become the latest internet registry to vote itself into greater secrecy. Earlier this year, the biz emailed its members to let them know that a month earlier the Nominet board had decided that it would no longer publish minutes of its meetings but instead supply an "update …
Why "wonder" when you can look it up? There are 9 people on the Nominet board, none of whom is an MP. There are 10 people on the board of the Nominet Trust, none of whom is an MP but one is an ex Cabinet Office advisor. Jim Knight, ex Labour MP for Dorset South, used to be the trusts's Deputy Chair.
Nominet are simply following industry best practise in order to increase stakeholder value via synergistically leveraged market-led growth strategies, garnered from the collective learnings of theh internet's thought-leaders.
Or to put it another way, they've seen how ICANN operate and thought, "hmm let's get us some of that!"
What stakeholders need to do is to also become mallet holders, and use those mallets to drive their stakes right through the board's heart (assuming they can find one). Although some extra teamwork would allow some of the stakeholders to be mallet-holders, and others to be burning torch or pitchfork holders. Which I think would also improve matters.
You can always use a dot.com.
Though I agree, in an idead world Nominet wouldn't be nobs, and we could pay reasonable prices for our dot.co.uk addys - and dot.uk wouldn't exist.
Or I was offered a special offer on dot.eu the other day - 99p each. I didn't want one before we voted to leave the EU, can't imagine it would be any more use afterwards.
Ergo, lack of transparency = opportunity to cheat, lie and steal.
Doesn't mean that every company cheats, lies and steals, but the possibility to do so is there.
It is especially bad in companies that are in charge of portions of Internet accessibility.
I think it is high time that someone writes down a Open-Source Charter of Address Registrators, or OSCAR.
Said charter would define very precisely and specifically how the registrar is suppose to operate, how decisions are to be made and how they can be challenged, the power and duties of the board, the managers, etc.
Any registrar not complying with OSCAR would be boycotted until dead.
And I'd like a double side of fries with that.
Wikipedia says Nominet is a non-profit company limited by guarantee. So at a guess its legal requirements are these.
If you look at Companies House you'll see there are several companies called Nominet all with the same address and things like Nominet UK is on the board of directors of Nominet Limited, so I'm not sure what's going on there.
Here in New York state, if you are a non-profit organization (aka "charity"/"public benefit"), in return for not paying taxes, the state gets a lot of visibility into the organization, and can act if it thinks you are paying your directors/CEO to much, not being charitable enough, etc.
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