• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Domain Industry & Internet News

Domain Industry & Internet News

Domain Name Industry News

  • Home
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submit News
  • Comment Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Advertise Hosting & Domain Industry Jobs
You are here: Home / registrars / Minds & Machines Replace CEO Antony Van Couvering With CMO Toby Hall

Minds & Machines Replace CEO Antony Van Couvering With CMO Toby Hall

February 22, 2016 by Michele Neylon

Minds and Machines (Top Level Domain Holdings) is one of the publicly traded companies involved in the TLD space.

The company trades on the UK stock market with the symbol: LSE:MMX

Earlier this morning news broke that the company’s board had voted unanimously to remove company founder and CEO Antony Van Couvering.

Van Couvering broke the story himself in a blog post over on CircleID with the unambiguous title of “I Got Fired”. Meanwhile M&M’s investor relations site provides a less emotional update on the changing of the guard.

Kevin over at DomainIncite spoke to the new CEO of Minds & Machines Toby Hall this morning, so his post is well worth reading. Hall apparently will be more channel focussed ie. he’ll be more interested in working with registrars than his predecessor.

So what went happened internally in Minds & Machines? We’ll probably never know. But there will  be quite a bit of speculation as to what led to the removal of Van Couvering.

The fact that the company is publicly traded would suggest that it’s going to be very focussed on investor return, which could be the cause. Whether any lack of return at this juncture is Van Couvering’s fault or not is irrelevant – as CEO he’d get the glory, or the criticism depending on how the company fared. However Van Couvering was one of the more vocal and bullish people who pushed for the launch of new TLDs. He’s now (almost) accepting that the demand wasn’t as high as they’d predicted:

Demand for new gTLDs hasn’t been what anyone expected. Many single-TLD registries, though not all, are hurting

And not all the applicants or projects worked out as well as some would have liked. Anyone remember .food?

So where will Van Couvering end up? Personally I have no idea, but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him.

 

Filed Under: registrars, registries Tagged With: Domain name, Domain Name System, Public company, Top-level domain

About Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and managing director of Irish domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. Michele has been deeply involved in domain and internet policy discussions for more than a decade.
He also co-hosts the Technology.ie podcast.

Primary Sidebar

Recent Articles

ICANN’s Cancún Meeting Was Almost Normal

Middle East DNS Forum to be Held in Istanbul

Gandi Merges with TWS to Form “Your.Online”

Anguilla Offline due to Fibre Issue

IGF 2023 to be Held in Kyoto, Japan

Recent Comments

  • ICANN Gets First Female CEO on Centralnic Head Honcho Announces Immediate Retirement
  • Kieren McCarthy Elected to Nominet Board on Nominet Election Candidates 2022 Finally Announced
  • Michele Neylon on Nominet Taking RDAP Out of Beta
  • Gavin Brown on Nominet Taking RDAP Out of Beta
  • ICANN Heading to Hamburg (ICANN78) and Los Angeles (GDD) Plus Training For African Registries - Goldstein Report on ICANN Announces GDD Summit Dates & Location

Categories

Blogroll

  • Alex Bligh
  • Circle ID
  • Domain Incite
  • Domain Name News
  • Domain Name Wire
  • Jason Thompson

Blogs

  • Domain Gang
  • Stéphane Bortzmeyer

Archives

Recent Comments

  • ICANN Gets First Female CEO on Centralnic Head Honcho Announces Immediate Retirement
  • Kieren McCarthy Elected to Nominet Board on Nominet Election Candidates 2022 Finally Announced
  • Michele Neylon on Nominet Taking RDAP Out of Beta
  • Gavin Brown on Nominet Taking RDAP Out of Beta
  • ICANN Heading to Hamburg (ICANN78) and Los Angeles (GDD) Plus Training For African Registries - Goldstein Report on ICANN Announces GDD Summit Dates & Location

Categories

Blogroll

  • Alex Bligh
  • Circle ID
  • Domain Incite
  • Domain Name News
  • Domain Name Wire
  • Jason Thompson
  • Nigel Roberts

Blogs

  • Domain Gang
  • Stéphane Bortzmeyer

Copyright © 2023 InternetNews.me