Nominet names new CEO as new chair promises real reform Troubled .uk registry operator Nominet has named a new CEO to replace the one fired by members earlier this year. At its annual general meeting (AGM) this week, the current CEO of the IT industry's chartered institute BCS, Paul Fletcher, was named as the permanent replacement for Russell Haworth, starting in February. …
Stephen Page squeezed in a 1 year term by a narrow margin on the loaded vote measure but was clearly outvoted by members by 300 to 200. Hence he doesn't have the confidence of the membership as a whole.
Given that the key message of the AGM by the chair was for the board to regain the trust of the membership - is Stephen's responsible action to seek out the pearl-handled pistol that Haworth left behind?
A Nominet member
I'm puzzled that he (and most of the board) didn't reach for that pearl-handed revolver when the EGM was called back in March. If they'd any self-awareness, they had to have realised the game was up at that point. Even Stevie Wonder could see they'd lost the trust and confidence of a substantial chunk of the membership. Or were they holding out for a 6-figure payout like the one that allegedly went to Haworth?
It’s quite simple - seek to recover Haworths payoff from the board members who instituted the removal of the zero compensation clause shortly before he resigned.
Board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company - enabling a massive payoff to an obviously departing CEO acted directly against that.
Any payout will come from their directors insurance but the bonus will be they’ll never be able to get cover again so will lose any more Board appointments they have.
"Surely a domain registrar could operate as a DAO, with direct control by the members of any pertinent decisions by democratic vote."
But then surely, could larger domain name registration services, then dominate proceedings, and this could lead to Nominet losing any sense of impartiality (not that it had much recently, going by the previous mis-management and investments in irrelevant "business plans").
The issue then comes down to what voting rights each tier of "domain name registration services" could be given?
lol.
There are many of this parish who will spit fire at the shenanigans at Nominet. Press some of them on whether an ENUM registry is a good idea and you might get a chilly reception.
You see, ENUM is only good for consumers. It's a bit crap for ISPs with delusions of VoIP grandeur and it is nigh on existential threat grade stuff for telephony providers. That's the mob that used to switch your voice circuits, who now twiddle your voice packets.
ENUM: Take your "Telephony ID" - phone number and put it in DNS. Specifically, you adjust it a bit and add your country code to normalise it. The DNS record goes into a special "reverse" DNS zone and it points at an IP address. Each country was allocated a DNS zone and each country designate's its ENUM operator. UK -> Nominet.
With the ENUM scheme you can dial a number and go directly to a device with a SIP client on it. No "telephony" operations involved as such. The number could end up on a PBX like Asterisk/Freeswitch/3CX etc. You can of course already do this via the existing DNS and email style addresses but we are conditioned to dial phone numbers.
Nominet will not run an ENUM registry. I asked them. Neither will they allow anyone else to do it (I offered).
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