Nominet suspends over 8,000 “criminal” domains as IP complaints double
Police claims of intellectual property infringement led to the number of .uk domains suspended doubling in 2016, according to Nominet.
Statistics released today show that the .uk registry suspended 8,049 domains in the 12 months to October 31, compared to 3,889 in the year-ago period.
It’s an almost tenfold increase on 2014, when just 948 domains were taken down.
Nominet suspends domains when law enforcement agencies tell it the domains are being used in crime. No court order is required and Nominet rarely refuses a request.
Registrants can have the suspension lifted if they can show to law enforcement that the allegedly criminal behavior has stopped.
The vast majority of the complaints in 2016 again came from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, which asked for and got 7,617 names suspended.
Just 13 suspensions were reversed, Nominet said. Most of these were due to sites selling so-called “legal highs” being slow to respond to a change in the law.
The controversial ban on “rape” domains resulted in just one suspension among the 2,407 domains automatically flagged for containing rapey substrings.
Nominet published the following infographic with more stats:
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Is my assumption correct that suspended domains are returned to the pool of available names, potentially to be re-registered?
Depends on the registry, but often such domains are ‘locked’ by the registry and held for a period, or until the Registrar Deletes them.