I just can't imagine why someone would give Nominet staff abuse, I have no doubt what she says is true but I just can't imagine what goes on in someones head to abuse Nominet staff.
For all the faults I have had with Nominet, I have never spoken to more professional or helpful people on the phone.
This appears to be political. We are told:
"UK domain investors need to show 'greater maturity' or risk governments riding roughshod over their business."...
"If I hear complaints about people being threatening or abusive [to Nominet staff] on the phone, it's people from this industry,"
For a start why would the government give a damn if some of Nominet's customers are rude to their customer service staff? Clearly they wouldn't.
So why would Cowley try and tarnish the domaining industry when clearly the majority of people in that industry have had no axe to grind with Nominet? This looks like a fabled enemy is being created (It's the communists! No it's the terrorists! No it's the domainers!) to justify tightening up control and transfer of power from stakeholders to senior management. Nominet and the goverment playing good cop/ bad cop vilifying the domainer boogieman to argue for changes which consolidate power.
The government wants tighter control over the Internet to censor certain things and for its big business friends and the bloated legal/ TM industry, again representing big business. That is the agenda. The Internet started out a free space. In the last ten years, each year has seen more and more regulation and control from governments, and more and more territory grabbing (reverse domain hijacking, huge expansion in anti-defamation laws etc) from lawyers acting on behalf of big business. So the Internet is no longer a free space, it is dominated by the power structure that dominates the real world, and that power structure wants greater control still, hence the Digital Economy Bill and similar legislation passed in parallel in all the developed countries. Either Nominet carries out the agenda or the goverment will try to cut them out.
So we have this pressure from the government on Nominet to tighten up control. This pressure took the form of scathing criticism last year when Nominet had to defend their own existence and the threat of government stepping in was brought up, even though there were no problems! The threat to Nominet just seemed to appear out of the blue. Why? It was the power structure cracking the whip.
The primary concern of senior management at Nominet, just like senior management in every organisation, is their own careers. So clearly they will do whatever the government wants to hang onto them. So then, in light of the criticism and threat of being sidelined posed by the government, Nominet senior management need to (1) be seen to be addressing any shortcomings highlighted by the government and (2) have a boogie man to blame so that any criticism can be deflected away from the boardroom.
Nominet's customers can be divided into 3 groups: domainers, registrars and individual registrants. They can't pick on individual registrants as there are so many, if that group were the subject of criticism it would make Nominet's own procedures look at fault. They don't want to pick on registrars because that's where the majority of their income comes from and we saw how the new voting system that was recently introduced favoured the big registrars. So we are left with the domainers, a seemingly easy target since they are fragmented, and have already been vilified by the legal/ TM community to make it easier for them to hijack domains for their corporate clients.
