If you enjoy a good power struggle, Nominet’s war of words has been extremely interesting to read. The UK domain name registry has member a voted board which invariably leads to people falling out with each other, and they generally bumbling from one crisis to the next.

Well they better straighten their ties, and comb their hair because this playground scrap is about to be thoroughly investigated by leading management academic Professor Bob Garratt, who will be conducting an independent review of the company’s governance structures, after pressure from Whitehall.

Garratt will report back before Christmas on whether the company has the current set up to be able to provide a suitable service that represents the interests of not only its members, but the government, the public and the IT industry.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) says that it thinks Nominet’s cracks will show when the report lands on someone’s desk at Whitehall.

Nominet’s executives, have tried unsuccessfully, to change the board to try to fix the problems, but some members believe that such they have undermined the firms democratic nature.

The split over how the company should be run has cause lines to be drawn, and Nominet are even planning to sue Jim Davies, one of the group’s non-executive directors over a conflict of interests. However, he retaliated by saying that the company has been mismanaged. Naturally both sides reject one another’s claims.

The man that will be exposing the weaknesses, Garrett, was a founding member of the Commonwealth Association for Corporate Governance, and currently works for the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency on banking governance. Nominet says he is also an external examiner for the Institute of Directors.

Nominet will present Garrett’f findings to senior BERR civil servant David Hendon, and said last week that he hope’s Nominiet’s members accept any of his recommendations without complaining.

As of August 2008 the .uk register held 7,000,000 .uk domain namesmaking it the fourth largest Top Level Domain in the world. Nominet also deals with disputes about registrations of .uk domain names, via its Dispute Resolution Service (DRS), which is similar to the UDRP system used for generic Top Level Domain Names, but with certain innovations such as a free mediation service.