So, as a domain name reseller, can I assume that if Mr. Fox et-al win, and they manage to get back the millions of "overpayments", that they will be passing this money back to their customers?

...or should I not assume that? :-)

I rather suspect the latter, in which case, I would rather the whole 15 million go to charity even if Mr. Fox thinks it's an "outrageous" donation to make.

Nominet calls itself a not-for-profit. However, in 2007 they made an operating "surplus" of £3.7m, up from £2.7m the previous year. Nominet also has in the region of £20m burning a hole in its pocket. See this year's report:

http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/28154_Nominet_R_A_2007.pdf

Fox, Davies, et al believe that Nominet should reduce this "surplus" by reducing the cost of registering names.

The QC's advice notes that a distribution of existing funds wouldn't be possible under Nominet's current constitution. He says that Nominet would be able to run at a loss by reducing costs, but this would be risky if .uk fell out of favour. There is no comment on Nominet breaking even.

Although Nominet states that they aim to "Achieve long term income and expenditure neutrality" and "Achieve long term cash flow neutrality", they appear to want to achieve this by spending several million a year on their pet charity, rather than by reducing the cost to registrars: http://www.nominet.org.uk/governance/financialprinciples/

Fox has attempted to turn it into a for profit some years ago, but as far as I've read, he isn't trying to this time.

Yep, that could work, but wouldn't it be better if that cash went to HM Treasury rather than a quango?

@Kerberos - How about a new rule, something along the lines of "If a domain points to a linkfarm/adsite for 12 months it is automatically de-registered. The current owner is barred from reacquiring the domain"? I realise that is not foolproof but it is a starting point.

Is it not slightly ironic that somebody who previously wanted to make Nominet a for-profit organisation, which would have inherently involved aiming to keep prices as high as possible, now wants an agenda that redistributes "excess profit" back to members, through lowering prices?

Isn't that a mechanism that benefits the largest users of the service - cyber-squatters and domain campers? Is there the slight whiff of fiscal self-interest here?

I'm with Kerberos - cheap domains cheapen domains.

If Moninet [sic] want to spend their excess cash, massaging the Board's ego with charity donations isn't the way. How about throwing a nice annual Nominet Members get-together instead? They want more participation, well how about buying it with a conference with food, drinks and freebies? Nothing attracts a geek to a conference like the prospect of a plastic bag full of cheap USB-powered tat to litter their desk with. It's only the same concept as politicians using our own tax money to buy our votes at election time, but far more palatable...

"How about a new rule, something along the lines of "If a domain points to a linkfarm/adsite for 12 months it is automatically de-registered"

I like the idea but this would be difficult (impossible?) to police and administer. The policy adopted by trademark law could be a go-er though. Basically, if you are awarded a trademark, you can (of course) use it. However, if the use of that trademark lies dormant for (I think it's) 5 years then anyone else can challenge your right to it. This effectively prevents hogging of trademarks that you have no intention of doing anything with. In any case, the trademark has to be renewed every 10 years; this is to ensure that (a) the gov. gets some more money from you :-) and (b) that you're still interested enough in the trademark to keep it alive.

For domains, I would think you would want to reduce the time limits to something like the one year that you suggested, rather than 5, but the principle could work. I think.

A couple of years back I registered the .com and .co.uk variants of my surname.

I use the .com on my CV and contact cards and have paid for it up to 2017 but I find that it gets inundated with UBE.

I cant remember ever having any spam via the .co.uk variant.

I'm convinced that this is because the .uk namespace is managed better than .com.

Spam could be stopped overnight but it is not in ICANN's interest to do so because they make so much money from these spamvertisers.

Long may Nominet remain as it is

"It has already reduced the pricing of domain names to resolve this problem."

The price of registering a domain name for two years - which forms the vast bulk of Nominet's income - has been constant at £5 since 1999.

http://www.nominet.org.uk/governance/scope/egmqanda/

Simple maths, simple business

Total Revenue less Total Expenditure = Profit.

So by definition Nominet is a Profit making Entity.

Of course they want to hide that fact and all their froth is merely to decide how best to do that.

Sticking with simple maths, simple business.......align the revenue with the expenditure.

What's so complicated about that?

As for the accumulated profits, use them over a defined period of time to reduce charges.

It is not the cost of a domain that drives the quality of service.

That is a function of the quality of staff, for whom the cost is already fully covered within the expenditure.

It's not a war chest if they give millions away to charity. A not for profit is supposed to make no profit, not 5 million for charity. The board wants 'loyalty payments' i.e. to make a hefty profit then reward themselves with big wads of cash.

So it's the old story, a few directors get comfy, start to see the money in the company bank accounts as somehow theirs, and can see the pot of gold growing, if only they can find a way to get control of it.

Rule 6 appoints 2 'independants' who are chosen by the board, which in my book means they'll vote with the board, making the cash grab possible. But there should be no cash there to grab! And no excess of 5 million to give to charities, and no money to spend on campaigning to stay in power.

Time for a board change.

Wouldn't cheaper domains result in people buying more, bundling them with products, more squatting etc etc?

Surely then what would happen is that Nominet end up with more 'surplus', and the problem won't go away. On the other hand, finding a domain you want will be near impossible with the only way to be to buy it from a domainer, who will be the one making the real cash.

For all the pros and cons in this argument, what sticks out more is the .com registration for the campaign website. Since specialresolution6.org.uk and specialresolution6.org are also registered, why bother registering and redirecting users to the .com equivalent?

How does the £15m compare to turnover? How many domain names are there?

Anyway, I have my own domain name. Rather than the hassle of getting a bit of money out of Nominet and through the agent, why can't they just give people an extension on their registrations?

I can see this idea involving money going mostly to a few big resellers of .uk domain names, who promptly lose most of it in administration costs. And nobody having to do anything even remotely dishonest...

Nominet calls itself not-for-profit, which is technically true because no-one gets that profit. Really, its more a case of "not-for-dividend" because any profit doesn't go to the members, which discourages carpet-bagging.

Of course, it could stop making a surplus by reducing prices. The board cannot just do that - they'd need the membership to vote for it (weird constitutional restriction of Nominet - not normal for a company). As comments here show, not everyone wants domains cheaper (bulk domainers clearly do, others don't).

So what do you do with the money? There's only so many USB sticks you can buy for techies without breaking the no-dividend rule. They spent a chunk on suing some scammers a few years back. So now the board are giving it to charity (personally, I like the idea - certainly better than giving it to the Government, especially since Nominet isn't Government owned).

As for all this stuff....

>you cant register an IDN - international domain name (xn--) with any

>NOMINET owned addresses (see their arcane rules) - hello? this is 2008

>for f***s sake.

True, but they did a consultation about it, decided that it was difficult and focussed on other things. Read the consultation. Technically it isn't hard for Nominet, but the public don't understand them and customer support would be a nightmare.

>you cant use a direct TLD of .uk (every other country in the world

>does this) - those 5 or 6 that exist redate 1996 when the rule was

>changed to not allow .uk

True, but is that bad? Increases the number of available names - its just that most people only recognise .gov.uk and .co.uk - but that's just advertising to fix.

>Theres still no real moves for .gb release - thanks.

They don't own it. Look at IANA.

>theres still no real move to give scotland and wales their country code

>names either.

They don't allocate top level domains (.scot, .wal etc). Go ask IANA.

>..and dont even get me started on DNSSEC. back in late 2007 they

> published a 'positional paper' which started off bright - they believe that

> it should be done - but by the last couple of pages they finished with a

>dozen cop-outs and tried to infuse a simple matter into something far

>more awkward and custom. hello? RFCs?

The original design allowed the entire .uk domain name list to be stolen, and from that all names and addresses to be taken from the WHOIS. They couldn't implement it. Slow and dull writing a better RFC may have been, but it turned a design that none of the big european registries (who comply with data protection laws) could use into one that they can.

Dave, if you look at the link I mentioned above - http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/28154_Nominet_R_A_2007.pdf - you can see that in 2007, the turnover was ~£15m.

Take a look at www.NOTnominet.org.uk for a few reasons why members should support the Nominet Board this time around.

Perhaps almost everyone would benefit were some of Nominet's accumulated surplus to be sent in the direction of the FIPR (http://www.fipr.org). Although the FIPR's objectives are somewhat broader than just protecting the internet, their recent work in this area is excellent and benefits webmasters and browsers both.

If they have cash to spend then they should be spending it on UK tech, hire a few people to work on bind. Make the root server infrastructure better. Fund some anti DNS hijacking solutions.

Who on earth is running this in the UK? Any net head worth his salt would invest back into tech architecture - they have been given something precious and as custodians they should not be frittering the money away, on charity.

Fair question - because of the early history of internet development in the UK, Nominet's position is unique (in UK terms, I dunno about elsewhere) and somewhat anomalous. AFAIK there's no real politically-accountable oversight of Nominet, yet they effectively have a government franchise to run our TLD. That's not a comfortable situation, IMHO.

The reason (as explained to me years ago by a Nominet person) is historical - Nominet (or rather its founder, Willie Black) set up .uk before the government had any idea of what the internet was, or how important it would become. When the government did recognise the need for a UK internet identity, it was much easier and cheaper for them to run with the existing Nominet one than to set up a new, official namespace of their own.

Because of this (and unlike eg the .fr namespace, which I think is directly regulated by the French government) the UK government has no constitutional control over any part of the .uk namespace. AFAIK even its exclusive rights to use .gov.uk, .police.uk etc are the result of a gentlemen's agreement with Nominet, rather than by any fundamental ownership mechanism (though I'm sure an ownership mechanism would be rapidly legislated if Nominet went rogue and tried to withdraw their use!).

I think Nominet have done a good job so far, but the lack of any political oversight and accountability bothers me, and I think the critical strategic importance of namespace control makes a constitutional review of Nominet's nature and role long overdue. Of course I don't want the government running the UK namespace as a public-sector IT disaster area, but I don't want a bunch of commercial ISPs or anonymous suits in Oxford running it as a private fiefdom either. Whether for profit or not.

What about other countries - can we do a survey of other national registry models to inform the debate on our own?

As for the war-chest - anyone know how much fibre you can buy for £20m? It sounds like pocket-money in infrastructure terms - would it make a significant dent in our national bandwidth deficit? And if it was spent on fibre, who would own it?

@Anonymous Coward

Nominet is run by lawyers - that wouldn't have ever crossed their minds!

Surely it would be possible to draft either legislation or best practice rules for nominet to prevent cyber/domain-squatting? It really pisses me off that just about every domain name I tried recently had been "acquired" by a company which simply set the price according to how many people enquired about that name. They wanted to sell me one domain name for £10,000 when the small business I was buying for has a turnover currently less than £5000!!!

It should be LAW that only nominet can sell domains; that domain reselling is simply not permitted. The price wouldn't matter then; you'd get the domain name you wanted from nominet and use it how you see fit; only downside is that you'd be stuck with it until it ran out. They should also allow registrants to extend their registration near the end of the two years if the business/web site was still up and running.

For every domain name I have ever bought in the UK I have paid my ISP to register the name and then a few months later nominet has sent me an invoice for normally about 10 times what I paid - none of which I have ever paid. Nominet are running an expensive service that on one needs and they are cashing in on the confusion of DNS registration. They should be forced to payback all the money they have demained over the years.

also, Resolution 6 defeated.

http://www.nominet.org.uk/news/latest/?contentId=5041