From Lesley Cowley, Chief Executive at Nominet

Hello and Happy New Year to you all. Welcome to the first Nominet News of 2007. In this issue we take a look back at a couple of the highlights from the end of last year and offer a taste of what’s to come.

We have a brief report on the latest happenings at ICANN and its meeting in Sao Paulo, which we attended for the first time as a full member of the country code name support organisation.

Emily Taylor, our Director of Legal and Policy, gives us her thoughts on the outcomes of the Internet Governance Forum and what it will mean for UK Internet users. More ›

At our Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) on 22 November 2006 our members voted to expand our scope, enabling us to bid to run other Internet registry services, such as UK ENUM. Our members also voted in favour of enabling electronic voting and communication, to enable simplified voting and increased participation. More ›

We are updating Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) to keep the service quick, simple, fair and approachable for all who use it, and to make sure that it keeps abreast of changes in the external environment. More ›

Thank you to those of you who submitted feedback to us regarding the proposal by Global Name Registry to introduce two-character strings within .name at the second level, and by implication the possible introduction of .uk.name. More ›

In September 2005, following the results of our customer satisfaction survey, in which over 80 per cent of registrars who responded said that they felt increased regulation or a code of conduct for the Internet industry was required, the Policy Advisory Body (PAB) agreed that Nominet should look at the issue of industry standards. We therefore undertook the consultation on Raising Industry Standards from 31st January to 31st May 2006. We have reviewed the consultation responses along with feedback from members, MPs and other interested parties. After discussion with the PAB it was agreed that the existing Tag Holder Agreement will be replaced with:

• a Registrar Agreement; and
• Good Practice Terms

More ›

On 8 August 2006, we took industry-leading action to prevent ‘domain tasting’, which has put a stop to the potential abuse of our automated registration service. Domain tasting, which has been a growing issue for .com for over a year, is the practice of registering domain names, assessing revenue generation potential and, if they create an insufficient return, deleting the domain names before the registry requests payment. Through the introduction of a new policy, we put a limit on the number of registrations that can be deleted by registrars. More ›

On 1 October 2006, charges for registrant transfers and registration agent changes were significantly lowered.

Our Registrant Services team has continued to make significant improvements to the processing of tag changes and registrant transfers. As a result, we are able to process these more quickly and efficiently, leading to price reductions.

The new fees are as follows: More ›