5. Do you see the launch of the .uk second-level domains as a success?
- full answer -
First of all, what were the motives for launching the second-level domains at all? I think it’s obvious that the primary motive was the increased revenue that could be gained by pressurising millions of people to double up and cover their existing .co.uk presence on the web. It was launched as a money making project.
Now, there are undoubtedly some situations where a .uk works better than a .co.uk. For example, I specialise in religious domains, and among many others I have Christ.uk – it simply seems more appropriate than Christ.co.uk, unless you think religion is a business (which in some cases it is!). However, for most businesses, the introduction of .uk was frankly an inconvenience, because it put their established web property in danger unless they coughed up extra money, as a defensive mechanism, each year.
And yet, whether through poor marketing, or simply because many people simply did not want these extra domains, millions of .co.uk registrants decided not to register the .uk – even when given a generous 5 year period to do so.
That was not the success that Nominet had hoped for.
A study of the registration history makes for a rather sorry story. I’m tempted to say it was shoddy, but I’ll leave that for my answer to Question 6, and in the end you have to decide for yourself.
By the summer of 2017, three years after their launch, .uk domains were flat-lining at around 600,000 registrations. Well over 9 million .co.uk registrants had failed to register their equivalent .uk domain. For many people, it seemed, the project was of no interest. To others, it may have been an annoying inconvenience. However it could hardly be considered a success.
The largest registrars were undoubtedly hoping for a long-term windfall from .uk (indeed, one wonders whether they were champions of the project when it was proposed, because they stood to make the most money from it, along with Nominet themselves).
And then, wondrously, Nominet announced a short-term ‘free promotion’, and what followed was staggering. I cover it in detail in the next question, but suffice it to say at this point, that GoDaddy’s owned company 123Reg, and Namesco (and yes, those were the companies with directors on the Nominet Board) took this ‘gift from heaven’ as the chance to mass-register over a million domains between them, even though these were actually ‘fake’ registrations in the sense that the so-called ‘registrants’ had not asked for these domains, and the Registry-Registrar rules prohibited registrations without consent.
The benefit for Namesco and 123 Reg was that they hoped they would then persuade their ‘ghost’ registrants to later renew their domains annually – something of a desperate and forlorn hope as it turned out – and the benefit for Nominet was that it masked the failure of .uk by massaging registration figures a little.
When I say a ‘little’ I am using litotes (okay, just sarcasm): let’s look at the stats for 2017. Before the ‘free promotion’ and ‘mass registrations’ the .uk numbers had been a bit over 600,000. After this ‘magical’ promotion the figures had shot up to over 2,100,000 registrations. But the sad thing was that most of those were essentially fake: not asked for, not claimed, not wanted. Later events would prove this.
Nominet had promised the public that after 5 years, all unclaimed .uk domains would be made available to everyone. That was the agreed process and undertaking. However, the .uk domains were not doing as well as Nominet wanted to make out. Interviewed by Techradar in May 2019, the interviewer asked, “Have you seen a lot of interest from business?” The Nominet staff member – and he is actually one of the people at Nominet I generally respect – replied “Since its debut more than 2 million .uk domain names have been registered.” I’m afraid that was a rather disingenuous answer because most of those domains had not been requested by businesses, or indeed by anyone. About 1,400,000 of them had at that point been mass-registered, compared to fewer than 700,000 actually requested by customers. The mass-registrations served to mask the poor uptake of these new domains. They trebled the number of registrations claimed in their stats. But many more ‘ghost’ domains were about to follow the next month…
With weeks to go before the 5 year period came to an end, the registration of .uks had, as I say, been moribund since those previous mass-registrations. At this point Nominet, who already knew that other large registrars might follow the precedent set by their directors’ companies offered yet another ‘free promotion’, and this time Fasthosts and Ionos1&1 accepted the open door and copied their rivals, mass-registering more than a million more essentially ‘fake’ registrations. The .uk registrations were now ‘peaking’ at 3,600,000 – wow! amazing! – only problem being that the vast majority of those domains were unwanted domains, registered contrary to the registrar rule that registrants must request them, and these figures could only go in one direction… and that was a huge dump.
When one of my rival candidates said, in answer to this question, ‘.uk was very successful in the numbers registered’ I find that hard to believe when most of them were mass-registered for free, but weren’t asked for or wanted by the ‘so-called’ registrants themselves. How is that success? It was a sham. Events that followed proved this.
By January of this year, .uk registrations had crashed by 1,200,000 from the ‘fake’ peak, after Namesco (whose employee and sitting director is my fellow candidate in this election) and 123Reg dumped the unwanted mass-registrations. They’d never been asked for, they were never wanted, and they had also messed up the agreed process, that at the 5 year point Nominet had promised they would be released.
Now fast forward to this September 2020, and what we are going to see is well over a million more .uk names being dumped, because the Fasthosts group’s mass-registrations are also unwanted, were never requested, and the overall outcome will be close on 2/3rds of all the .uk registrations will have disappeared into nothingness, which was actually what they were all along.
By mid-September .uk registrations will have plummeted from a peak of 3.6 million (64% mass-registered and not requested) to little more than 1.3 million.
So has .uk project been a success? For some people, it has been useful. About 80,000 domains were eventually bought when the 5 year period was up – but over 2 million were unavailable because they’d been mass-registered. The situation 6 years after launch is that 8 out of 9 people have not chosen to buy a .uk to protect their .co.uk. That’s an awful lot of websites vulnerable to confusion, to rival companies, to maybe lost sales. In fact, as probably many of the .uk domains have been bought for speculation and warehoused, the actual use of .uk domains is even smaller.
Personally, the .uk domains work for me, in my specialist field. But I do think that the prevailing motive for Nominet and the large (mass registering) companies was the opportunity to make money, even if that meant inconvenience to their existing customers, circumvention of Registrar rules, disruption of agreed process, and some loss of reputation because of the way the large registrars and Nominet co-operated together, when actually – as we’ve seen in this Q&A process – almost all the candidates call out what happened as ‘not the right thing to do’.
It frankly bungled a project that was already in trouble. My hope for Nominet is that the interest in .uk domains will slowly increase. It probably needs to, because Nominet seems to be banking on increasing revenue to funnel into diversification projects. The logical other way to increase registry revenue is, of course, to raise the price of domain names…
- full answer -
First of all, what were the motives for launching the second-level domains at all? I think it’s obvious that the primary motive was the increased revenue that could be gained by pressurising millions of people to double up and cover their existing .co.uk presence on the web. It was launched as a money making project.
Now, there are undoubtedly some situations where a .uk works better than a .co.uk. For example, I specialise in religious domains, and among many others I have Christ.uk – it simply seems more appropriate than Christ.co.uk, unless you think religion is a business (which in some cases it is!). However, for most businesses, the introduction of .uk was frankly an inconvenience, because it put their established web property in danger unless they coughed up extra money, as a defensive mechanism, each year.
And yet, whether through poor marketing, or simply because many people simply did not want these extra domains, millions of .co.uk registrants decided not to register the .uk – even when given a generous 5 year period to do so.
That was not the success that Nominet had hoped for.
A study of the registration history makes for a rather sorry story. I’m tempted to say it was shoddy, but I’ll leave that for my answer to Question 6, and in the end you have to decide for yourself.
By the summer of 2017, three years after their launch, .uk domains were flat-lining at around 600,000 registrations. Well over 9 million .co.uk registrants had failed to register their equivalent .uk domain. For many people, it seemed, the project was of no interest. To others, it may have been an annoying inconvenience. However it could hardly be considered a success.
The largest registrars were undoubtedly hoping for a long-term windfall from .uk (indeed, one wonders whether they were champions of the project when it was proposed, because they stood to make the most money from it, along with Nominet themselves).
And then, wondrously, Nominet announced a short-term ‘free promotion’, and what followed was staggering. I cover it in detail in the next question, but suffice it to say at this point, that GoDaddy’s owned company 123Reg, and Namesco (and yes, those were the companies with directors on the Nominet Board) took this ‘gift from heaven’ as the chance to mass-register over a million domains between them, even though these were actually ‘fake’ registrations in the sense that the so-called ‘registrants’ had not asked for these domains, and the Registry-Registrar rules prohibited registrations without consent.
The benefit for Namesco and 123 Reg was that they hoped they would then persuade their ‘ghost’ registrants to later renew their domains annually – something of a desperate and forlorn hope as it turned out – and the benefit for Nominet was that it masked the failure of .uk by massaging registration figures a little.
When I say a ‘little’ I am using litotes (okay, just sarcasm): let’s look at the stats for 2017. Before the ‘free promotion’ and ‘mass registrations’ the .uk numbers had been a bit over 600,000. After this ‘magical’ promotion the figures had shot up to over 2,100,000 registrations. But the sad thing was that most of those were essentially fake: not asked for, not claimed, not wanted. Later events would prove this.
Nominet had promised the public that after 5 years, all unclaimed .uk domains would be made available to everyone. That was the agreed process and undertaking. However, the .uk domains were not doing as well as Nominet wanted to make out. Interviewed by Techradar in May 2019, the interviewer asked, “Have you seen a lot of interest from business?” The Nominet staff member – and he is actually one of the people at Nominet I generally respect – replied “Since its debut more than 2 million .uk domain names have been registered.” I’m afraid that was a rather disingenuous answer because most of those domains had not been requested by businesses, or indeed by anyone. About 1,400,000 of them had at that point been mass-registered, compared to fewer than 700,000 actually requested by customers. The mass-registrations served to mask the poor uptake of these new domains. They trebled the number of registrations claimed in their stats. But many more ‘ghost’ domains were about to follow the next month…
With weeks to go before the 5 year period came to an end, the registration of .uks had, as I say, been moribund since those previous mass-registrations. At this point Nominet, who already knew that other large registrars might follow the precedent set by their directors’ companies offered yet another ‘free promotion’, and this time Fasthosts and Ionos1&1 accepted the open door and copied their rivals, mass-registering more than a million more essentially ‘fake’ registrations. The .uk registrations were now ‘peaking’ at 3,600,000 – wow! amazing! – only problem being that the vast majority of those domains were unwanted domains, registered contrary to the registrar rule that registrants must request them, and these figures could only go in one direction… and that was a huge dump.
When one of my rival candidates said, in answer to this question, ‘.uk was very successful in the numbers registered’ I find that hard to believe when most of them were mass-registered for free, but weren’t asked for or wanted by the ‘so-called’ registrants themselves. How is that success? It was a sham. Events that followed proved this.
By January of this year, .uk registrations had crashed by 1,200,000 from the ‘fake’ peak, after Namesco (whose employee and sitting director is my fellow candidate in this election) and 123Reg dumped the unwanted mass-registrations. They’d never been asked for, they were never wanted, and they had also messed up the agreed process, that at the 5 year point Nominet had promised they would be released.
Now fast forward to this September 2020, and what we are going to see is well over a million more .uk names being dumped, because the Fasthosts group’s mass-registrations are also unwanted, were never requested, and the overall outcome will be close on 2/3rds of all the .uk registrations will have disappeared into nothingness, which was actually what they were all along.
By mid-September .uk registrations will have plummeted from a peak of 3.6 million (64% mass-registered and not requested) to little more than 1.3 million.
So has .uk project been a success? For some people, it has been useful. About 80,000 domains were eventually bought when the 5 year period was up – but over 2 million were unavailable because they’d been mass-registered. The situation 6 years after launch is that 8 out of 9 people have not chosen to buy a .uk to protect their .co.uk. That’s an awful lot of websites vulnerable to confusion, to rival companies, to maybe lost sales. In fact, as probably many of the .uk domains have been bought for speculation and warehoused, the actual use of .uk domains is even smaller.
Personally, the .uk domains work for me, in my specialist field. But I do think that the prevailing motive for Nominet and the large (mass registering) companies was the opportunity to make money, even if that meant inconvenience to their existing customers, circumvention of Registrar rules, disruption of agreed process, and some loss of reputation because of the way the large registrars and Nominet co-operated together, when actually – as we’ve seen in this Q&A process – almost all the candidates call out what happened as ‘not the right thing to do’.
It frankly bungled a project that was already in trouble. My hope for Nominet is that the interest in .uk domains will slowly increase. It probably needs to, because Nominet seems to be banking on increasing revenue to funnel into diversification projects. The logical other way to increase registry revenue is, of course, to raise the price of domain names…
