As with other ccTLDs in the early days it was originally delegated by Jon Postel to a "trusted person" to manage.

[8] In time, he passed it to Willie Black at the UK Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA).

Originally, domain requests were emailed, manually screened by and then forwarded to the UK Naming Committee before being processed by UKERNA.

Membership of this committee was restricted to a group of high-end ISPs who were part of a formal peering arrangement.

By the mid-1990s the growth of the Internet, and particularly the advent of the World Wide Web was pushing requests for domain name registrations up to levels that were not manageable by a group of part-time volunteers.

Various plans were put forward for the possible management of the domain, mostly Internet service providers seeking to stake a claim, each of which were naturally unacceptable to the rest of the committee.

In response to this Black, as the .uk Name, stepped up with a bold proposal for a not-for-profit commercial entity to deal with the .uk domain properly.

Commercial interests initially balked at this, but with widespread support Nominet UK was formed in 1996 to be the .uk Network Information Centre, a role which it continues to this day.

However, some domains delegated before the creation of Nominet UK were in existence even before 10 June 2014, for example mod.uk[10] (Ministry of Defence), parliament.uk[11] (Parliament), bl.uk[12] and british-library.uk[13] (the British Library), nls.uk[14] (the National Library of Scotland), nhs.uk[15] (The National Health Service), and jet.uk[16] (UKAEA as operator of the Joint European Torus experimental fusion tokamak).

.net.uk is more open, but the Nominet regulations still mean that a registrant must be an ISP, or a similar body, and that the domain is not used for providing services to end-users.

Previously applications were made in the normal way, but after Nominet came to an arrangement with the education authorities, one domain per school was issued automatically.