The boardroom voting scandal at the (usually sedate) '.co.uk' company

Rarely does dissent, intrigue and acrimony ripple through Nominet, the organisation which for most of the time takes care of the highly unglamorous and for the most part sedate task of administering the .co.uk domain name.

But this week is an exception. Tomorrow, the organisation - a not-for-profit company set up to register the now 6.6 million .co.uk domain names - has a crucial boardroom vote which may influence how much it costs a company or individual to set up a website. And the outcome is hotly contested.

For 12 years exactly - the time Nominet has been in existence - the wholesale price of registering and renewing a .co.uk domain name has remained unchanged at £5. Some members want that changed, though, and there's a significant and unusually heated debate about how.

Approximately half of Nominet's members run a business selling domain names to companies and individuals. They want the price reduced, because it will mean that the cost of 'sitting on' addresses prior to selling them will be reduced. (Some companies have more than 20,000 domain names in a pool waiting for the sale, so the twice-yearly cost of renewing them would come down by tens of thousands of pounds if the wholesale price is reduced even by £1.)

The remainder - many of whom run websites on other companies' behalf - would like it raised, because it will mean their clients will take more seriously the process of re-registering the domain name every two years. "At the moment you've got this absurd situation where whether a domain name as important as bbc.co.uk gets registered depends on whether some person in accounts remembers to pay the £5 every two years," one Nominet insider said.

Because of the vagaries of the company's consitituion, a vote on a change to the fee would require a 90 per cent approval of members, which the Nominet management says is "extremely unlikely", given the split.

Still, the progressives are adamant. They've put forward two 'rebel' candidates to be elected to the board at tomorrow's AGM who, Nominet says, would attempt to push through the changes - a move the organisation's management opposes. So last week its chief executive, Lesley Cowley, sent a letter to members urging them not to vote for the reform candidates.

Asked what kind of a majority would be required among the 40-odd members expected to attend the event in London would require, Ms Cowley couldn't be specific, blaming the complex voting structure of the organisation. "But you'd need a massive swing, definitely," she says.

Is she worried?

"It's a decision for our members to make," she said coyly today at the Internet World conference in London. Stay tuned.