Steve Herbert
Head of Service Delivery
As Nominet’s Head of Service Delivery, I am responsible for Nominet‘s customer operations, including customer support, registrar compliance and abuse prevention. I’m keen to foster a culture of continuous improvement across our services and we’ve been working hard to add value for you – our customers. We’re focusing on reducing inefficiencies, while identifying improvements to our systems and processes.
As part of this improvement process, we’ve identified some areas we want to strengthen in this review programme taking both registrar feedback and the types of information we look to gather in the event of a complaint, into account. We know that registrars are keen for us to ensure these compliance processes are applied consistently, and that when required, we hold non-compliant registrars to account. We also want to reduce any unnecessary burden on registrars and avoid laboursome tick box exercises.
Our work shows us that most registrars are meeting these requirements consistently on an annual basis, so from now on we will focus on accounts where we have reason to believe compliance issues may be occurring. For many registrars, this will mean reviews will take place every two years, unless we receive a complaint, or we believe there is a reason to investigate non-compliance, which we hope will save you time and effort.
Going forward, we will be focusing on some key areas, which include:
- Confirmation of trading status or identity of an individual
- Compliance with tag specification, our payment and credit terms, data validation and AUP limits
While these changes mean some may need to change how they use their account, we don’t believe registrars will need to make system changes, unless they have an existing system error which causes a repeated breach of our terms.
In addition to the scheduled reviews the compliance team will proactively monitor registrar behaviour around those key areas and will carry out compliance checks where necessary. This may not lead to a full review but may in some instances.
These changes will come into effect from the beginning of the new compliance review cycle in May 2023 and we will of course continue to work with registrars to help them remedy any instances of non-compliance before applying any sanctions.
We hope that these improvements will enable us to further strengthen our compliance processes and better serve our registrars.