Nominet UK

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Nominet UK is the .uk domain name registry in the United Kingdom, which was founded by Dr Black Willie on 14 May 1996 when its predecessor, the 'Naming Committee' was unable to deal with the volume of registrations then being sought under the .uk domain. Nominet is a non-profit company limited by guarantee. It has 'members' who act as shareholders. Anyone can become a member, but most members are companies who supply internet based services to customers. Most members are also registrars.

Unlike the model in other countries, by and large customers wishing to register a domain do not approach Nominet directly, but register the domain via a registrar. This is an organisation registered with Nominet to register and update domains on behalf of customers, and who have provided a PGP public key to enable Nominet to authenticate communciations from them. The term registrar replaced the old term 'tagholder' in March 2007.

As of January 2007 the .uk register held 5,522,104 .uk domain names (with an annual growth rate of 18.14%) making it the third 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.

1 History
2 Second-level domains managed by Nominet
3 Second-level domains managed by other organisations
4 See also
5 External link

[edit] History

Most countries have their own Top Level Domain. The .uk TLD was first used during the 1980s, and at that time a voluntary group called the 'Naming Committee' managed the registration of .uk domain names. By the early 1990s, commercial companies started to sell domain names to customers. As demand for domain name registrations grew, it became clear that a voluntary group could no longer cope with the volume of registrations being requested. A new organisation was needed to manage the .uk TLD and as a result Nominet UK was formed. There were discussions about what type of corporation the Registry should be. The options to set-up as a profit-making company or a charity were rejected, and Nominet was established in 1996 as a private, not-for-profit company, limited by guarantee.

Moving domains to the newly formed company registrants of existing domains were invited to agree to Nominet's new terms and conditions. There were several complaints from pre nominet domain owners objecting to the need to start paying for something that was previously free.

Many pre-nominet domain names had little or no contact information, as a result it has been hard to work out ownership of the domain names. Nominet run an internal project (the PreNom project) to clear out the remaining pre Nominet domain names so by the end all domain names would be under the new Nominet terms and conditions. This was completed in March 2007.