Public Benefit: So long, and thanks for all the fish!

[whois-search]

What do members make of the Public Benefit email ?

TL;DR - SB is standing down at the AGM (16th October) and said:

What did we achieve together?​

Pricing​

• Kept the price of domains at £3.90, despite inflation from January 2020 to now being ~23%.
• It’s likely to be kept at this price for the foreseeable future too.

Tech​

• Unlocked a large amount of capital to complete the technology refresh needed, after years of neglect.
• This will provide significant cost savings from 2025.

Membership & Engagement​

• Reinstated the Community (sadly the lost data couldn’t be recovered)
• Hired a Community manager (replacement currently being sought)
• Ran an increased number of membership events
• New annual board report format, and new half-year reporting to increase transparency and accessibility.
• Attempts to improve engagement but still a major area of weakness. I’m hopeful it will start to improve with recent changes.

People & Culture​

• COMPLETE replacement of the board;
  • Chair, CEO, CFO, SID, Company Secretary and member elected NED’s
  • Nobody in common with pre-EGM board - providing opportunity for the culture reset that’s happening.
• Finally recruited a CTO, to lead a technology company (Imagine…) who promptly knocked 3 tech teams into 1 to improve performance and progress stalled projects.
• New Chief Customer Officer (CCO) role replacing the legacy MD Registry/Public Benefit, with a focus on customers. This should improve how Nominet interacts with members massively, watch this space.
• Recruited a Procurement Officer to negotiate with suppliers and drive down costs.
• Recruited a CISO who’s implemented a massive programme of security improvements, improving our security posture significantly.

Public Benefit​

• The Chair created a Public Benefit Committee (that I was appointed to) to oversee the donation of an additional £50M from reserves over 3 years (£65M total) for Public Benefit activities. Flagship projects included;
  • Micro:bit - £5M
  • Institute of Coding (IOC) - £12.4M
  • Good Things Foundation - £4.5M
  • Southwest Grid for Learning - £5.1M and
  • £2.6M towards countering harm via Internet Watch Foundation, Lucy Faithfull & ParentZone.

 

[Kaleido]

 

[Jeff]

I'm surprised by the lack of response to this thread.

I'm not a Nominet member, but what strikes me is the vast amount of money being given away to what the board have decided are worthy causes. Granted, it's an improvement on the equally vast amount of money the previous board invested in failed business ventures, but shouldn't charitable giving be both individual and voluntary?

Nominet had just under 10.5 million domains under management at the end of June, so £65 million over three years equates to about £2.06 per domain per year, which is more than half the £3.90 registration fee, which I find shocking.

I've always thought that Nominet should be run along the same lines as the Passport Office, where the price of a passport is set by dividing the anticipated cost of running the Passport Office over the next year by the number of passports they expect to issue. It's probably a bit more complicated than that, but the general idea is just to cover costs, with possibly a bit put aside in a contingency fund.

Imagine the issuing of passports being handed to a company called Passinet, which promptly doubled the fee and gave the surplus to the directors' pet charities. The public outcry would be such that it wouldn't be allowed to stand.

So the bottom line is that although Simon Blackler has made some progress, I think there's still a long way to go.

 

[rob]

I'm surprised by the lack of response to this thread.

Member engagement is ridiculously hard. To me a big reason for that is people are very jaded from all the nonsense over the years, the view that basically Nominet will do what they want regardless and basically what is the point.

It is hard to criticise anyone with that view.

How does it get fixed? 'Change' is always coming in the future, and is again now apparently. If that means anything no one knows for sure.

Simon Blackler has made progress, but as you say, long way to go...

 

[ukbackorder]

In the immortal words of Frasier:
'At Cornell University they have an incredible piece of scientific equipment known as the tunneling electron microscope. Now, this microscope is so powerful that by firing electrons you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building blocks of our universe. If I were using that microscope right now... I still wouldn't be able to locate my interest in this.'

As Rob said, we are jaded. But it's good to know that things are going to get better with the right people in the right places just like every year....

 

[whois-search]

Nominet had just under 10.5 million domains under management at the end of June, so £65 million over three years equates to about £2.06 per domain per year, which is more than half the £3.90 registration fee, which I find shocking.

Nominet also has a large investment portfolio (stock market shares) which is making more money than the domain margin.

In my opinion it seems the EGM (firing half the board) wasn’t enough to ‘change’ the culture of Nominet. So the new CEO has changed his top C-Team and then got rid of the duplication with 68 roles made redundant. If you like he has now had an EGM internally…

That change of guard will without doubt focus the minds of those left on cost cutting and delivery. However the age old problem of distributing the profit/surplus from Nominet still remains.

This will always be the case as long as clause 6 of the memorandum remains there. I’m not in favour of this latest method of distribution ie. giving £2 - £5 million to whoever they see fit. Some of the past connections between directors and those charities are interesting.

For example the CEO used to be trustee and chair of Southwest Grid for Learning which just got £5.1 million. This should be an arms length process…

With no public benefit committee or Nominet Trust who is going to approve the awards? The whole board on recommendation from the executive (who wrote the board papers)?

 

[Jeff]

Blackler's website was called publicbenefit.uk, so no great surprise where his priorities lay. But he's proved that a well-organised campaign can achieve some results - starting on a high-note with the despatch of Haworth with his tail between his legs.

Now that Blackler is stepping back perhaps it's time for another campaign with different priorities? coveringcosts.uk is FTR...

As a non-member I can't read the candidates' statements, so any chance of someone posting them here?

 

[Jeff]

For example the CEO used to be trustee and chair of Southwest Grid for Learning which just got £5.1 million.

That is also shocking. These people are shameless.

 

[diablo]

For example the CEO used to be trustee and chair of Southwest Grid for Learning which just got £5.1 million. This should be an arms length process…

This should definitely be an arms length process. That is blatantly wrong. As Jeff says, they are shameless.

It seems that very little has changed at all. New faces, same old story.

 

[rob]

In my opinion it seems the EGM (firing half the board) wasn’t enough to ‘change’ the culture of Nominet. So the new CEO has changed his top C-Team and then got rid of the duplication with 68 roles made redundant. If you like he has now had an EGM internally…

That change of guard will without doubt focus the minds of those left on cost cutting and delivery. However the age old problem of distributing the profit/surplus from Nominet still remains.

It will be interesting to see how the change affects things in the future. Was it a reactive move based off the significant contract loss, or a proactive move to reshape Nominet into something more agile? Or a bit of both?

I do think Nominet does some Good Stuff with Member / registrant cash, but communications on who decides how much / what / the impact is... is lacking. I can't easily reference or cite examples of it. It is then hard to say if it is too little , too much, or value for 'our' money.


There is a side issue for those in the UK domain industry where there is little organisation or formal consultee group that Nom or others could liaise with. Public Benefit has been one that worked, with outcomes. If there was some kind of standing 'body' the public benefit stuff could have been one 'campaign' and then pricing another. Generally domainers will feel a 'small' increase much more than single registrants or retail IMHO.

There is also a valid case that renewals could actually decrease rather than automatically go up.

This also feeds into the break up of small UK communities, perhaps by some who won't even be here in a renewal cycle or two time.

 

[Jeff]

This also feeds into the break up of small UK communities, perhaps by some who won't even be here in a renewal cycle or two time.

That's a bit cryptic for me.

Are you referring to the proprietor of the other place? Where, incidentally, this entire thread would probably be deleted because it's critical of a potential advertiser.

 

[whois-search]

It will be interesting to see how the change affects things in the future. Was it a reactive move based off the significant contract loss, or a proactive move to reshape Nominet into something more agile? Or a bit of both?

Personally I think the PDNS contract loss provided the CEO an opportunity to restructure the whole company.

While they argue that there is now one business unit instead of two (Cyber + Registry combined) … the job loses I noted from LinkedIn were in membership engagement etc and other registry roles. In fact the ex cyber guys are now running registry!

Maybe they did put out a call for voluntary redundancy but some of those people had been there 25 years plus (will be paid off substantial amounts of money).

 

[astutiumRob]

I'm not a Nominet member, but what strikes me is the vast amount of money being given away to what the board have decided are worthy causes.

Even a casual glance at the entire concept shows it was always been fronted as "hedge against taxation/interference" but was largely utilised as way to get "cushy job to squander more millions". Attempts to morph that scam into something else/useful has led to givehub but personally I think it needs less "retiring" and more "putting out of it's misery".

No objection to some Nominet excess in the way of staff/resources/tools/assistance being worthwhile, but the general idea of maintaining bloat/profits to be able to pat yourself on the back for giving some of it away can only lead to corruption.

In my opinion it seems the EGM (firing half the board) wasn’t enough to ‘change’ the culture of Nominet.

It needed to be a clean-sweep if it was going to make a real difference.

That change of guard will without doubt focus the minds of those left on cost cutting and delivery

Now that we're all reduced to just being customers of the rehashed Cyber division, the board needs a shakeup if delivery is to be anything other than par for that department i.e. practically none ;)

 

[rob]

Personally I think the PDNS contract loss provided the CEO an opportunity to restructure the whole company.

While they argue that there is now one business unit now instead of two (Cyber + Registry combined) … the job loses I noted from LinkedIn were in membership engagement etc and other registry roles. In fact the ex cyber guys are now running registry!

Maybe they did put out a call for voluntary redundancy but some of those people had been there 25 years plus (will be paid off substantial amounts of money).

I would tend to agree.

It will be interesting to see how it all spins out, but I would guess PDNS + inflation = price rises, and baked in rises for future as well.

£10 a name for 2030?