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1.8 million UK grandfathers die after Nominet deadline hits

Kevin Murphy, June 25, 2019, 10:40:18 (UTC), Domain Registries

The deadline for registering “grandfathered” second-level domains in .uk passed this morning, leaving at many as 1.88 million names unclaimed.
From June 2014 until 0500 UTC this morning, anyone who owned a third-level domain in zones such as .co.uk or .org.uk had rights to register the matching 2LD under .uk.
Those rights have all expired now, and all the unclaimed 2LDs will be returned to the available pool next month.
Four days ago, Nominet said that there were still 1.88 million rights that had not been exercised. That’s from the over 10 million 3LDs whose registrants were initially given rights.
In March, 3.2 million names were still unclaimed. It seems about 1.4 million names have been claimed, or expired, at the eleventh hour, almost all in June.
One way of looking at it is that the owners of almost one in five .co.uk domains either decided they didn’t want the matching 2LD, or were unaware that it was available.
But about half of the original domains with rights have since dropped, so the portion of current 3LD owners now at risk of confusion with their 2LD match could actually be more like four in 10.
At the end of May, 2,439,181 .uk domains had been registered (including non-grandfathered domains) and there were 9,729,224 names registered at the third level.
The 1.8 million unclaimed names will now be the subject of a landrush.
On July 1, Nominet will start releasing the names in batches, alphabetically.
Accredited registrars will start slamming the registry — Nominet has set up a separate set of EPP infrastructure purely for this expected onslaught — with requests to register the most-valuable names.
Some registrars have been taking pre-registrations and will auction any names they successfully claim to the customers who put in pre-orders.
After a week, any names not already claimed by registrars will be released to the public, again in batches, starting from July 8.
The system has been criticized by smaller registrars, many of which believe Nominet is giving its larger registrars a much better chance at winning the good names simply because they have deeper pockets.

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Comments (3)

  1. Sam says:
    June 25, 2019 at 7:55 pm

    The issue here is nominet don’t care about the smaller registrar’s and with the higher tier having to deposit 90k to get 150 requests a minute is not fair it should of been all of nominet member get the same limit.

    Reply
    • Dan says:
      June 27, 2019 at 8:09 pm

      Don’t be daft, don’t you see? It’s totally fair because so long as you can loan Nominet £90K it is equal so it’s all fine and dandy.
      /sark

      Reply
  2. Paul says:
    June 28, 2019 at 1:12 pm

    We created this site so people can look up what domains are going to become available from 1st July: https://search.name.uk/

    Reply

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