It's not obvious it was conscious. It's an endemic problem in British business culture, and there are obvious rewards for conforming.

People who do "growth" and "strategy" invariably seem to believe they're worth the big money, even if they're actually harming their organisations and lowering their effectiveness and survival prospects.

If they're as good as they think they are they should have no trouble selling their innovation elsewhere.

Core infrastructure (domain registration, SSL certs, IP addresses, peering exchanges) mostly need administration and maintenance. But NGOs in this space seem haunted by a compulsion to do more. It's interesting - and possibly correct - that the leadership projected their own feelings onto the staff here. They're basically throwing their hands up and saying "but that's boring!"

Handing humans a revenue stream and a dictate to "keep a steady hand on the tiller" seems prone to the same failure mode as asking a proverbial AI to "just make us some paperclips".

It's the same with every TLD. They invent processes, paperwork, registrar meetings, weird EPP extensions, user verification, arbitration procedures, hearings, just to make themselves useful and have a reason for the annual payments.

The bureaucracy exists to increase the bureaucracy.

> Without growth and innovation, we can’t keep our vital staff who connect more than 10 million .UK domains and maintain our service without disruption or downtime. »

They had all of their growth and innovation, and couldn't keep their own basic website up (before being posted to HN) [1].

Presumably it was, as you say, a justification.

[1] https://twitter.com/444rrrggghhh/status/1374103065889026053

Their idea probably was that if the company wasn’t going to grow, why would it need an expensive board member such as themselves?

Sounds like an interesting chicken-or-egg question for a business ethics textbook.

The business world is rife with these kind of situations. When you hire new leadership, how do you signal that you’ve hired top talent? By paying them above median wages. What happens to median wages when every company turns over their leadership every 18 months and pays replacement execs “above median”?

If they wanted the business to grow, perhaps reinvesting the multiple millions of dollars they were paying themselves back into expanding the business would have been a prudent choice.

You pay yourself in excess when you think your business's ROIC will be poor/risky or your tenure will be short. These folks are either not very smart or just hypocrites.