el Reg have covered the sad failings in Nominet for years. The article you linked contains a lot of links to prior coverage and are worth reading if you have some spare time.

Nominet has a monopoly over .uk. They are also the org that were tasked with ENUM for the UK. Back in the day there was a web page on Nominet's website describing how it would revolutionise telephony. Then it vanished. For a laugh I called them and was told that ENUM would never be enabled in the UK and no, I can't set it up myself either - they would not allow the delegation.

I doubt ENUM will ever become a thing. I should explain that ENUM allows people to run their own telephone numbers. Yes we can all do VoIP via email addresses (!) but those normal looking phone numbers can be made to work via ENUM without involving a "provider".

If we could use ENUM then I could register my phone number via DNS. The following is slightly adjusted to avoid my PBX exploding. So 01935 476222 becomes 441935476222. My local town is Yeovil and that has the code 01935 within the UK (so does at least one Sherbourne and a few other bits hereabouts.) The country code for the UK is 44 and the rule here is you drop the leading 0 to make a canonical "international" phone number.

Now, reverse the digits and put dots in between then and stick a suffix on the end and pop it into DNS with a pointer to a PBX or even a single handset that talks VoIP.

This presentation explains it all: https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof8/Daley-ENUM.pdf (lol!)

Thanks for posting this, was very informative.

I think The Register did a fantastic job in their reporting on this. They clearly skewer the CEO and cronies on the board, but always back it up with clear data and arguments that just emphasize how poorly Nominet was run.

> At an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on Monday, a single resolution to remove all five passed narrowly [PDF] with 52.7 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 53 per cent of members.

Wow. 53% turnout for something very important and with a limited membership. Why isn't voting compulsory? Vote (or abstain) or lose your membership IMO.

It's sad that most of the domain registries have been overrun by business vultures that aren't even competent enough to grow their core business; selling domains.