Head Domainz man took large payout

By ADAM GIFFORD

Former Domainz chief executive Patrick O'Brien picked up almost $170,000 from the InternetNZ-owned company in five months, including a large golden handshake.

Domainz manages the registry of .nz internet addresses for InternetNZ (formerly the Internet Society of New Zealand), and also acts as a registrar. There was widespread speculation on society discussion lists about the existence of the payout when Mr O'Brien departed in September to head a Singapore internet company, i-DNS. Secrecy clauses meant no Domainz board members could confirm it.

The Domainz report for the year to March 31 reveals an $155,000 increase in personnel costs for the year, from $696,112 to $851,335.

It said that while no permanent employee received more than $100,000 during the year, "one contract employee received remuneration and other benefits totalling $160,000-$170,000 during the year".

Mr O'Brien, a former Telecom executive, drew fire from sections of the New Zealand internet community for the way he managed the handover of responsibility for the .nz country code top-level domain (ccTLD) from Waikato University, where it had been handled.

Domainz chairman Bob Gray would not discuss the circumstances of Mr O'Brien's departure or confirm a payout. Former Internet Society executive member Mark Harris said the society was not informed of any payment by its subsidiary.

"If there was one, it was money well spent," Mr Harris said.

"Patrick was a good person to have on the job when we were setting up Domainz and had to make some hard decisions, but he also needed to go when he did."

He said Mr O'Brien's management style rubbed many technically minded people up the wrong way and councillors believed they were not getting all the information they felt entitled to.

Mr O'Brien could not be contacted for comment.

Much of the criticism of him arose from the former Domainz board's decision to commission Wellington's Glazier Systems to build a domain registry system (DRS) using Microsoft tools.

While the Domainz-operated .nz ccTLD name servers have functioned properly, the registry has been plagued with bugs, angering service providers and competing registrars.

Last year's report described the DRS system glowingly, but the latest one says the DRS "is unsuitable for continued use and cannot be readily adapted to meet the requirements of the shared registry environment".

InternetNZ chairman Keith Davidson said Domainz would probably look for packaged software to run its shared registry, rather than go for another custom solution. The present system, which cost about $750,000, would be dumped.

Mr Davidson said that while the list of major bugs had been cut from more than 100 on launch to about 30, some - such as the difficulty the system had accepting credit-card payments - seemed intractable.

Despite the problems, the number of .nz domain names registered with Domainz increased during the year from 56,794 to 89,265, with almost all registrations completed within one day. The published annual domain-name fee is now $49.50 compared with $68 in 2000, but the average price charged is $39 when discounts to internet service providers are accounted for. Operating expenses per domain name have dropped from $34.49 to $20.83.

The company earned $1.59 million on turnover of $4.5 million, with a $275,000 dividend paid to InternetNZ, as well as a $120,000 management fee for policy work. Mr Davidson said InternetNZ was well advanced on designing specifications for a new, shared-registry system.