Nominet registry, which managed the UK's ccTLD, published a report on fighting illegal usage of domain names for the last 12 months until October 2017. 16,632 domain names were suspended at the request of the law enforcement during this period. This is twice as much as in 2015-2016. In 2015-2016 in was twice as much as in 2014-2015.
This serious increase, according to Nominet's management, shouldn't cause concern. “The upward trend in suspended domains confirms that increasingly criminals seek opportunities online, but also shows how our cooperation with the law enforcement community and our expertise in network analytics helps tackle this problem thanks to the established processes and cyber security tools we have in place”, points out registry’s CEO Russell Haworth. The report also highlights that blocked 16,632 names are only 0,14% of the total number of domain names under registry’s management.
The majority of suspended names (13,616) were blocked at the request of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. Another 2,781 domains were suspended under the suspicion that it was involved in some kind of fraudulent activities. The least “claimed” was the ban on domain names that provoke sexual violence, which is in force since 2014. In a year there were only two such names and only six altogether since 2014.
