.UK modernisation, standardisation and legacy service retirement consultation

Background

When Nominet was founded in 1996, it established the technical systems for the .UK platform which enable Registrars, and later Registrants to administer .UK domains. The codebase which supports the .UK registry platform is predominantly bespoke and has evolved over time.

As Nominet has evolved, Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) was introduced, and we have developed our own registry platform that uses standard EPP to support gTLD and ccTLD clients. This means that Nominet currently operates two codebases, which could be combined and updated. This gives us and our stakeholders the opportunity to identify what works well in our systems and what could be improved.

To support the future progression of the Registry, we need to develop and modernise our platform. This presents an opportunity to align with global domain industry standards, improve the customer experience, increase security, and deliver efficiencies. To do this, we will need to retire some of the systems Registrars are familiar with which would result in significant change.

July 2024 update

The consultation closed in April 2024 with responses from Registrars representing a diverse range of business models. We received 112 consultation responses which represents 69% of .UK domains under management (DUM). We have reviewed the consultation feedback and produced a summary available in full here.

We will provide an update in September on next steps and timelines.

May 2024 update

There were only two proposed changes within the consultation with proposed timelines stated in 2024 which were:

  • Close new applications for access to the Domain Availability Checker (DAC) from Monday 3rd June.
  • Remove the specific limitation on the usage of the check command in both EPP and Web Domain Manager on Tuesday 4th June whilst retaining the rest of the Acceptable Use Policy for EPP.

On the 4th June 2024, the following paragraph of the EPP Acceptable Use Policy was deleted:

Use of check command

In order to protect our systems, the check command is limited to a total of 5000 checks on domain names per day. To clarify, 100 domain name checks in a single request will count as 100 against the limit of 5000. The limit is measured from midnight to midnight. If the limit is exceeded, the check command is automatically disabled and will remain so until the following midnight.

The following paragraph will be inserted in its place:

Use of check command

There is no hard limit on the total number of checks per day for a registrar.  Since the check command returns the exact time that the domain will drop and therefore accurate results can be cached by the registrar; we will continue to consider that registrars sending check queries for the same domain(s) around the time of drop to be subject to the complete EPP Acceptable Use Policy.  

If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].

Supporting information