Nominet UK

[5] This represents a year-on-year downward trend, when compared to February 2020, this is mainly due to the lapsing of the recently launched .uk domain names.

[6] Nominet was founded by Dr. Willie Black and five others 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.

This was distributed widely, and a meeting to discuss ways forward was held at a hotel at Heathrow Airport on 11 April 1996.

John Carey resigned before taking up his role following a disagreement over the creation of police.uk From Nominet's inception on 1 July 1996 until 2002 domains registered pre-Nominet were provided free of charge.

[24] Under the tenure of Russell Haworth, a former mergers and acquisition specialist, Nominet invested heavily into autonomous vehicles, the Internet of things, and white-space spectrum management which did not pan out.

In 1999, candidates stood for the board on a platform similar to 'carpetbagging' attempts with mutual building societies;[26] whilst this was defeated,[27] following a financial report from Alex Bligh, one of the founders, covering the potential conflict between turning a profit to maintaining sufficient financial reserves and its goal of maintaining long-term profit and loss neutrality.

[34] .uk registry watchers noticed unexpected changes in ownership of various .uk names, including sunset.uk, waterfall.uk, pad.uk and trending.uk, all of which were sold by Fasthosts to one or more industry insiders in advance of the domains being released by Nominet rather than going through the proper public process.

[35][34] Nominet introduction of .uk to compete with .co.uk and .org.uk has resulted in increased cost to UK brand owners and caused much confusion amongst registrants.

[36][37] In July 2020 Nominet announced a new policy consultation for expiring .uk domain names,[38] but it has been mired with controversy as it seems not to be in the public's benefit.

[42] On 2 February 2021, over 140 members wrote to the board of directors via Rory Kelly the company secretary calling for a general meeting to propose two ordinary resolutions:[43] Rory Kelly, Company Secretary[46] stated that the number of votes each member was entitled to cast would not be released until the results had been published.

[59][60] On 7 April 2021, Bradley, as interim CEO, stated that Nominet would begin to regularly publish the voting rights of members.

[61] On 12 April 2021 Sir Michael Lyons and Alex Pawlik sent a joint letter to the acting Chair Rob Binns.

[67] Priorities would be reduction of costs and executive pay, re-building of trust with the membership, and restoration of Nominet's public benefit purpose and charitable proceeds.

[68] Blackler and La Bolle replaced out-going directors James Bladel of GoDaddy (who had not stood for re-election), and David Thornton, who "defended the previous management's actions", had received six percent of the votes.

Stephen Page (who "was opposed by the Public Benefit campaign") received 51.4% of weighted votes for an extension of one year as a director.

[72] On 10 March 2022, Nominet announced[73] it would be "not accepting registrations from registrars in Russia – we are suspending the relevant tags" and in doing so became the first previously neutral ccTLD in history to reposition itself as non-neutral.

A £4 million investment into registry services was announced in February 2020[75] alongside the acquisition of US-based cyber security company CyGlass.