“Criminal” domain suspensions drop again in .uk but thousands of pandemic domains frozen
Nominet suspended thousands fewer suspected criminal domains in 2020 than last year, according to the registry’s latest annual update.
For the 12 months to the end of October, Nominet took down 22,158 domains, is down from 28,937 in the year-ago period.
As usual, suspected intellectual property crime made up almost all the takedowns — the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit was behind 21,632 requests, down from 28,606.
Notably, despite the reported uptick in scams related to the coronavirus pandemic, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency made just 13 takedown requests, down from 31.
This is perhaps due to Nominet taking a proactive approach, putting domains containing certain related keywords on hold at the point of registration. It froze 3,811 such domains this year, later releasing 1,568.
Eight domains were suspended for criminal activity related to Covid-19, the company said.
There were no suspensions related to banned “rape” domains, despite over a thousand new registrations being flagged for manual review. Nor were there any takedowns of domains hosting child sexual abuse material.
It’s the second year in a row that suspensions have been down. In the 2017/18 period Nominet took down 32,813 domains.
Seems the domaining industry never took many proactive steps to take down criminal content.
Even the .us registry has all kinds of websites and foreign (not business related) addresses on WHOIS. They don’t do anything except collect money.
They only use the rules when they need to be ‘selective’ about enforcing them. I’ve seen domains get taken for purely political grandstanding and all kinds.
I do support the TLDS we have, but why WOULDN’T we move to decentralized domains at this point? We enjoy NO benifits of having a centralized system. We are getting price hikes left and right, phished, scammed, and nothing – nothing back!
We can get all that on decentralized domains without the selective theft of extortionist price hikes.
Really it’s in danger there are actual legitimate alternitives and it’s right around the corner unless people start lifting a finger and making themselves worth something rather than take take take.