Nominet loses AGM vote by huge margin

Nominet’s board failed in its attempt to change the company’s constitution at yesterday’s AGM. Chair Andy Green and his board fell a long way short in their attempt to convince the company’s members to pass the Special Resolution, with 38% voting against.

The company rules required a 90% majority in favour, so the resolution failed by a whopping 29%. It even failed to get close to the 75% threshold that company law requires for a special resolution to succeed.

That’s despite Nominet leaving publication of the proposed changes to the last possible moment and leveraging the company’s considerable resources to urge members to vote in favour.

Weighted Voting sprang into action, finding that many members were already opposed to what Nominet was trying to do. Despite a disappointingly low turnout of only 15% of members, 122 voted against the resolution. Nominet’s claims that this is just a small group of activists is simply untrue and is not supported by the facts.

“Nominet hoped to quickly push this through, against members’ wishes.” said Michael Toth, a prominent Nominet member and a leading Weighted Voting campaigner. “Those directors who said they would bring change should be considering their positions today.”

Michael Toth

What we need now is a declaration in court on whether Nominet’s weighted voting and subscription payments are lawful or not.

Andy Green has already committed Nominet to not make an application to court and not spend Nominet money dealing with it. We will take Andy at his word.

“With the potential financial implications for members, we think a form of “crowd funded” legal claim, based on the arguments presented in Iain Mitchell KCs Opinions is the way forward.” said solicitor Jim Davies “We can organise this on a “fixed fee” basis with the lawyers, so that everyone knows there is a cap on the legal costs. It doesn’t need to be anywhere near the scary figures Nominet have bandied about.”

Jim Davies

Weighted Voting has said all along that this doesn’t need to be a battle. Let’s take this opportunity to sort it out once and for all. The answer is not certain, but whatever it is, it has to be better than all of this infighting and bickering.

18th October 2023