monopoly
The .UK TLD is a natural monopoly and it is an asset of the UK. It has become the plaything (cash cow) of Nominet with little regard for its smaller members and zero regard for the millions of organisations and individuals who are the end-users of domain names. As a web designer since the mid 1990s I've had plenty of experiences interacting with Nominet, in the early days it was excellent, I once got help direct from Willie Black (who was chairman back then), but in more recent times, several cock-ups (some I've written about on The Register).
As an organisation it has a (recent) history of poor decisions and mismanagement as well documented on The Register and Sir Michael Lyons' report.
From my perspective apart from the price rises there was the farce in respect of the release of .uk as an alternative to .co.uk
The "benefits" of that were increased revenue for Nominet and their member registrars, it did not, as Nominet claim, increase the number of names available. For example Tesco own tesco.co.uk, had they not bought tesco.uk someone else would have. If they used it in manner in any way detrimental to Tesco then Tesco would have either invoked the Nominet domain name resolution process (more £££ for Nominet) or taken it to court (£££££ for lawyers) - so a no-brainer to buy the variant for a few pounds a year. And the name is of no other value to tesco, like many other large organisations, they don't use it, it doesn't even route traffic to tesco.co.uk
Nominet suggest that a shorter name is easier to use - yes but saving 3 keystrokes? - for the small number of people that go to a website by typing the URL rather than following a link, bookmark or browser autocomplete? As it turns out many users are suspicious of the variant anyway: .com and .co.uk are familiar and so (relatively) "trusted" .uk just looks odd.
As an end-user of uk domain names that means I need twice as many. Sure the wholesale cost is under £4 p.a. but for many end users the registrar adds a considerable margin to that and a bit of up-selling so at 123reg for example many are paying around £12 per name plus a further £12 for Domain Ownership Protection (whatever that is). Businesses with two-word names often hold variants with and without hyphens (domain-example.co.uk and domainexample.co.uk) so at 123reg they might end up paying almost £100p.a. And then some businesses have additional names perhaps those of well known products/brands, especially trade marked names, and historic names (for example I expect HSBC still holds on to Midland Bank related names). OK it's no big deal for HSBC or whoever but for struggling SMEs, start-ups and micro-businesses every penny counts.
A major shake-up of Nominet is long overdue. There are two options: that the members succeed with the current initiative or that the true "owner" of this national asset,central government, takes back control on the basis that the original deal was non-profit with some charitable commitments, has been breached.
We are uneasy about government being too hands-on, there is a risk that they might just hand the reins to their chums but also they aren't characterised by speedy action, by the time committees, enquiries, consultations and tendering processes were complete the present incumbents would have retired to spend their millions.
Can the members succeed though? It's not just a matter of getting sufficient for an EGM but also gaining enough attendance and votes at that EGM. Do we really suppose Nominet won't be doing whatever is necessary to encourage some of those members to vote against? One can imagine all kinds of potential "inducements" to members so the end-users remain the only losers.
What can be done to encourage members to vote for change when some are beneficiaries of this gravy-train?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
