Registrant Type data quality

The recent interrogation of Google, Amazon and Starbucks at the Parliamentary Select Committee prompted me to do whois inquiries on a few of the major intuitively-"non-UK" companies.

As a strong supporter of Nominet's data quality initiatives, I thought it would be interesting/instructive/amusing to see how some of the big players shape up.

I am rather surprised to note that several have an "unknown" registrant type. Previously I had assumed the major issues involved the individual v sole trader space, but it appears that there are rather bigger fish to, er, fry !

At first I thought this might simply be a weakness of the whois inquiry translation for specialised registrant types, but ibm.co.uk - a pre-August 1996 registration for a non-UK company - and others manage to successfully represent themselves accurately.

ibm.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
google.co.uk - Unknown
amazon.co.uk - Unknown
starbucks.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
audi.co.uk - UK Limited Company
renault.co.uk - UK Limited Company
peugeot.co.uk - UK Public Limited Company
bmw.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
samsung.co.uk - UK Limited Company
dell.co.uk - Unknown
sony.co.uk - UK Limited Company
apple.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
microsoft.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
mcdonalds.co.uk - Unknown
pizzahut.co.uk - UK Limited Company
burgerking.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
kfc.co.uk - UK Limited Company
lufthansa.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
klm.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation
airfrance.co.uk - Non-UK Corporation

So, unless I am missing something, it feels like Google, Amazon, Dell and McDonalds are glaring anomalies that, in conjunction with Nominet, need to sort out a pretty basic bit of admin. My list is clearly subjective, but I hope you will agree it is a reasonable selection of big names, many of whom are correctly represented.

 

The problem is that 'Registrant Type' is not a required field by Nominets systems. This means that some registrars just ignore it, even if the correct data has been supplied by the registrant.

I've never really understood why it's not a required field, particularly as Nominet keep banging on about whois data quality.

Grant