Sad News On Chris Holland

Sadly, news has started to filter through that Chris Holland has passed away. I didn’t really know Chris, but from the small bits we chatted over email, he was a character.

I heard about it through a friend, but they found out about it through the domainer’s tradition of seeing Chris's names start to drop. He managed to catch one, reached out to Chris, and got the reply that Chris had passed away. Unfortunately, this seems to be quite common over the years. While domainers are a small community and at least know of each other, our families and next of kin don’t. News like this tends to take a long time to filter through, and often the first indication of someone passing is names dropping.

I didn't know much of Chris when he was at his most active, he was mostly before my time.

The late 2000s and early 2010s were quite confrontational between domainers and Nominet’s board. Chris reached out to me at some point - I’m not sure exactly when - but he offered support. At that point, any help was appreciated, etc. What I didn’t know was that Chris had already had his own run-ins with Nominet’s board and was already primed and ready to go nuclear.

His emails weren’t for the faint-hearted, but then he started copying me on some of the emails he was sending to the board - uh oh. He went straight in at number 10 - and when I say Number 10, I mean Number 10. He started copying in David Cameron. When you saw the email address he had for the PM, it dawned on you that the chances were - that was David Cameron’s real email address, or certainly the Number 10's cabinet office email.

Some of the stories around Chris’s stunts are sort of legendary. I was sworn to secrecy when I first heard of them about 15 years ago, so I won’t repeat them. Safe to say, though, that the domain world of the early 2000s lost a real character, a controversial one but a character nonetheless. I know he wasn’t everyone’s favourite, and some domainers really didn’t have time for him, but a character has gone.

I'm not sure on the quality of the names that dropped after Chris passed, maybe they were dropped deliberately but it's another reminder to have something in place so that should the worst happen, your family know how to deal with them.