Chris Holland's response to the ".UK and spam" thread
Firstly, I'd like to make a personal and sincere apology to the numerous members of this board that it's become obvious to me, I've seriously upset at some time or other over the Thirteen years that I've been in this Industry. It's fair to say that I used to be an obnoxious hothead with an ego even bigger than Denys, and that's saying something!
People who know me nowadays or have had recent dealings with me know that I've mellowed considerably. I freely admit that I used to be an utterly obnoxious b***rd. Nowadays, I'm more than happy to leave all the stress and venom to the Haters. Enjoy!
I know that there will be at least one particular Hater pompously itemising each point of this email and dissecting and trying to discredit piece by piece every statement that I've made and try and bait me into a war of words. I'm sorry, I just don't have the time. I've addressed all the points in the thread accurately and comprehensively. If you disagree with what I've said then I'm all broken up about that. I probably won't even be able to sleep tonight but I'm not going to post anything further on this matter. Sorry Haters, no more fuel for the fire little boys!
Every single time my name, any of my employees or organisations are mentioned, the usual cadre of Haters immediately spring into action to spew forth their vitriol and seize the chance to once again demonstrate their dislike or hatred of me. I admit to being very surprised that the self- proclaimed and preposterously named "Domain Lord" and the esteemed Mr Thornton haven't put the boot in yet, One can only assume that they're both seriously ill or otherwise incapacitated. There's simply no way they'd be able to resist a thread this juicy! Wishing the both of you all the very best and I hope that you both get well soon!
I suspect that many enmities have sprung up from the heavy handed and crass way that I used to run my former Detagged forum, the very first .co.uk dropcatching orientated forum and the World's largest before Alan took over that mantle.
Alan isn't the hothead that I used to be and has been a safe pair of hands for this community. Personally I wouldn't have ceded total and utter Editorial Control and the right of veto over all content on the Board to
OUR much admired employee Nick Wenban-Smith but that's Alan's call. I'm sure in any case that with what is currently coming out in the wash, the penny is going to drop very soon for Alan that Wenban-Smith's aggressive and scary sounding cease and desist threats are almost in every case utterly baseless and without merit and in many cases have proved to contain, or to be based upon, serious and repeated material inaccuracies. BTW, that means "lies" for the less educated members among us.
I have it on extremely good authority that the "Beloved Wise Leader" Kim Jong-un of North Korea was so impressed by Wenban-Smith's diligent work over the past few years in attempting to stifle all freedom of speech or any valid criticism whatsoever of Nominet or himself and especially of the future Baroness Cowley of Cricklade DBE from the hundreds of disaffected Nominet members and blindly aiding and abetting the numerous breaches of anything remotely approaching the good corporate governance of OUR company (Note for Alan for the inevitable takedown demand from NW-S, not my opinion, but a simple and irrefutable statement of fact backed and endorsed in an expensive written recent opinion by one of the top Corporate Law Silks (QCs) in the UK), that he recently offered Wenban-Smith an important and lucrative job in the DPRK.
Sadly, Nick reluctantly decided that he had to turn it down partially for cultural reasons. He told my source that although he greatly admires the glorious Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, although admitting that in many ways is profoundly similar to Nominet, it's far too democratic and liberal for his tastes as compared to the organisation that he currently works for. He decided that the move would be far too much of a culture shock compared to the totalitarian dictatorship that he is used to serving under. The main reason was, as is usually the case, down to the moolah. Kim Jong-un's salary offer of a half of a million pounds paled into insignificance compared to the multi-million pound "success" bonuses that Nick and every single member of Nominet's "Senior Management Team" are going to award themselves upon the successful flotation of Nominet PLC on the London Stock Exchange in 2015. Sorry, I'll rephrase that. The utterly impartial "Remuneration Committee" of Non-Executive Directors that have been "appointed" by the future Baroness Cowley DBE directly to the board and that none of us have voted for and are paid £35K a year for a few days work a year to rubber stamp whatever our Fuehrer tells them to, are going to award each member of the Senior Management Team a multi-million pound "success" bonus.
Now don't get too excited fellow members and purported owners of the current but soon to be deprecated incarnation of Nominet! There is NOT going to be any Building Society/AA/RAC type of windfall for us, the shareholders. The memorandum and articles of association of the company that WE OWN specifically precludes any of us receiving a single penny of income from Nominet. Talking of the articles, it's interesting to note that Nominet is also prohibited from making a profit as it was formed strictly on a not-for-profit basis but of course our beloved Fuehrer (or is that Fuehreress?) is able to pick and choose which rules suits her agenda and which ones don't. If the ludicrous £12 registrant transfer charge really is based on the non-profit making "cost recovery basis" that Nominet claim, where do all the enormous profits that Nominet make come from?
The entire revenue raised from the IPO or full listing, minus of course tens of millions of pounds to the Investment Bankers with £35K Brioni suits wining and dining our Fuehrer and the tens of millions allocated to the flotation's "bonus pot" for Nominet's Senior Management, will be generously donated by us to, yep, you've guessed it folks, to the Nominet Trust. This will in one fell swoop make Nominet the largest corporate charitable donor in UK history and will surely secure our Fuehrer the DBE or the elevation to the peerage that this greedy woman so deeply craves. She really needs to secure the life peerage. The DBE (and of course her existing OBE) can and will be revoked upon her criminal conviction for the illegal acts that she has committed at Nominet. As the dodgy Lord Archer found, life peerages cannot be removed for criminal convictions. So if she makes Baroness Cowley of Cricklade, she'll get to keep the ermine and title after her release from prison. I have a feeling she won't be seen showing up at the House of Lords much. But then again, despite the long running parliamentary expenses, the old buffers who turn up at the Lords are still handsomely recompensed. I'm finding it difficult to envisage that her phone will be ringing off the hook with lucrative job offers after her release, so money might be a little tight. She actually might brazen it out and claim the £300 a night hotel allowance and the generous daily attendance fee. The Houses of Parliament offer some pretty decent restaurants with quality fare at heavily subsidised prices.
.UK HAS already been decided by the future Baroness Cowley DBE. It IS going ahead and there IS a project team that have been working on the infrastructure implementation of it for many months now. The consultation period was a sham. Nominet refused my request to have the responses independently monitored and also refused my request to publish any of them online in stark contrast with numerous former consultations for far less important developments or initiatives.
If anything ever needed to be put to a vote of the entire membership then this is it. The future Baroness Cowley DBE ensured that the “independent” (LOL) governance review took out the clause that would have enabled us from being able to vote (against) on her annual double digit percentage pay increases, her hundreds of thousands of pounds of backdated performance bonuses (in addition to her extremely generous (to put it mildly) and substantial LTIP payments). We've paid, without ever being consulted or offered a single vote, to pay her literally millions of pounds worth of remuneration over the past few years for running a completely unregulated organisation that virtually defines the word “monopoly”? Is this woman with a less than impressive CV really worth DOUBLE or TREBLE the salary of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? Seriously! You really couldn’t make this stuff up!
Even though I know from a contact at Nominet that over 95% of the responses are highly negative towards the “proposed” .UK, Nominet will shortly announce something in the vein of “We have received significant input from the wider stakeholder community about .UK and have been careful in taking all points of view into account and the vast majority of the responses were positive and therefore have decided to go ahead with .UK”.
Isn't it curious how they didn't email the holders of all existing .co.uk domains with a simple yes or no vote? Why aren't we being asked to vote for .UK? Of course that's like expecting that Turkeys would vote for Christmas.
My disclaimer at the bottom of our deprecated .UK “pitch” (no longer used by the way, OLD NEWS) made it extremely clear that the exact allocation protocols have not yet been ratified. We all know that Nominet are going to protect their friends in big corporates by letting trademark holders have first dibs on .UK. Most established domainers are aware that 99.9% of .co.uk domain names are not subject to any intellectual property rights and although the exact allocation protocols have not yet been ratified, it’s patently obvious to anyone with more than a double figure IQ that the next precedence, after TM holders, for a .UK is, without a scintilla of doubt, going to be to the holders of the corresponding .co.uk version. The s**t storm that would be caused by doing anything other than offering non-TM .UK domains to the .co.uk holders would result in tens or hundreds of thousands of UK companies suing Nominet or initiating the MOTHER of all Class Action lawsuits.
We all know that the extremely competent, affable and universally admired and respected Nick Wenban-Smith enormously enjoys aggressive litigation and court actions, especially against dissenting ex-directors and even against his own employers, US the owners of Nominet. However doing anything other than awarding the .UK versions of non-TM existing .co.uk holders defies all logic and would produce such a mountain of work for Wenban-Smith that he’d probably experience a nervous breakdown like our Fuehrer's frequent absences for stress. He'd probably voluntarily surrender his solicitor’s practising certificate. An action that I rather suspect many people would be extremely pleased at and that the legal World and Nominet would most certainly be infinitely better off for.
If I’m proved wrong, all the normal Haters who automatically criticise anything that I say or do just because they are jealous that I own a bigger domain portfolio than they do or they’re jealous that I founded the public facing .UK dropcatching industry or they’re jealous of the fact that I live in an enormous multi-million Euro Mediterranean-front mansion in Spain overlooking Gibraltar with two swimming pools, one outdoor and one indoor and a large indoor jacuzzi in the ground floor leisure centre, or whatever other reason they dislike me for, can come on Acorn in a few months and absolutely slate me to death. And I mean absolutely massacre me. The Haters would have an absolute field day. Just think of all the hundreds of extra hours they can rack up posting their hateful bile filled with righteous indignation about me! (IMHO time which would have been far better deployed on pro-actively marketing their unsold domains but hey, what the heck? Whatever turns you on)
I’ve always been slightly bemused by these Haters who judging by the sheer number of posts must have spent literally thousands of hours on the Acorn forum making their snide posts about myself as well as various other domainers or industry figures who have incurred their wrath in some way or have bruised their fragile egos. They eagerly impose their laughable and uninformed opinions on us at the drop of a hat and are as ready as a coiled King Cobra ready to strike upon the faintest whiff of controversy or negativity. On examining the PRSS though, I’m unaware of a single one of these domain owning gentlemen (sorry, I’m forgetting their wives and girlfriends who are also tag holders but probably believe that a domain name includes the www suffix or that a Class C means some illicit but weak drug) ever being able to sell even 10% of the domains that they have clearly bought to resell at a profit. The thing that baffles me, is that if the average domainer with say a small portfolio of 1,000 or 2,000 domains instead spent that thousands of hours on pitching their domains to potential clients, they’d easily sell an extra £100,000 worth of domains a year. At the very least £1,000 a week of domains. If you hit the numbers you’ll sell domains. It’s as simple as that.
A little wake-up call folks. Spending thousands of hours on any forum that will only ever contain snippets of useful information is what I call NON REVENUE.
Wikipedia defines "spam" as the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited BULK messages, especially advertising, INDISCRIMINATELY.
Unfortunately for the uninformed and bitter Haters, my sales team's emails don't even begin to qualify on either count.
Sending one individual email at a time is the absolute diametric opposite of the definition of "bulk" and personalising and customising every single email to a recipient who almost certainly had previously tried to register the domain that we're now offering them is the complete opposite of "indiscriminately".
Another almost universally accepted definition of this practice is the indiscriminate sending of exactly the same email to more than 10,000 recipients. I personally receive hundreds of spams a day such touting fake medicines, MLM schemes and timeshare buy-back scams and am as annoyed as anyone about spam. Its common knowledge that I previously used spam as an effective marketing tool to sell several million pounds worth of domains before the EU outlawed it. I noted with amusement that some of my most vociferous critics of this practice at the time on this forum, about a year later, not only started spamming themselves, but they actually copied my entire pitch script and IP disclaimer verbatim! Hypocrisy beyond belief! But, you know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
My sales team have not engaged in spamming for several years now. We don’t send 10,000 identical emails out to people, we don’t send 1,000 emails or even 100 or even 10 identical emails. We send individually personalised emails to registrants who own the .com, .net or .info version or the hyphenated version of the non-hyphenated .co.uk domain that we’re marketing and use Companies House to find out the names of the directors of the company or the listed admin contact if not obfuscated by the relevant ICANN registrar and we offer to sell the name to them. My sales team send one single email to one potential client personalised exactly to them individually one at a time. Every single email is unique and several minutes is taken over its preparation prior to sending. Not even the most fanatical and rabid anti-spammer zealot could seriously in a million years call sending one individual B2B email to a specific recipient and personalising and customising the email to them at the rate of one single email every few minutes using Outlook 2013 and NOT using mailing lists or automated email sending software of any kind as "spam". Anybody who does is clearly a complete and utter moron and I have absolutely no interest in hearing the opinion of someone so utterly clueless and stupid. These pitches are not sourced from or put on any mailing list and if we don’t hear from them, we’ll never email them again.
Apologies again to anybody that I have offended or alienated in the past. I'm truly sorry to everyone that I've dealt with in anything other than a totally professional manner. I would urge anyone who stills bears me a grudge to email me and let me know what I did or said wrong. It would help me to avoid making the same mistake again and I could give you a direct and sincere apology knowing exactly how I annoyed or upset you. And if possible, I could try and make it up to you. Love me or loathe me, I'm a very useful guy to know as the dozens of domainers that I deal with every single week will attest to.
Now there will always be the Haters who love to jump onto any thread and add fuel to the fire of any controversy and dislike me just because it's fashionable to dislike me. Some of these Haters have never actually dealt with me and do not know me at all first-hand. To these people I make no such apology and would strongly urge them to go and procreate with themselves! A little snippet of the "old" Chris in there!
Wishing everyone on the Board every success in 2013 and I'll sign off now with a cheerio!
Best wishes,
Chris Holland
