The UK country-code domain registry, Nominet, has released its statistics for February 2019. The figures tally some 9.76 million third-level domain names registered under co.uk, org.uk, me.uk and the like against some 2.27 million second-level registrations. It is probably worth mentioning that for quite some time, it was impossible to register a domain in the second-level zone.
Things changed five years ago. It was then that Nominet announced a grace period granting third-level registrants the preferential right of registering a matching second-level domain name. The period will end in a little more than three months. Even assuming that all the second-level domains have been taken by the owners of similar third-level domains, still less than a quarter of all registrants have taken the opportunity.
According to Domain Incite, several major British registrars working with corporate clients have warned about serious risks of cybersquatting. For example, if a certain British company owns the domain example.co.uk and fails to register the domain example.uk in the next three months, anyone would then be able to do it, including hackers, distributors of counterfeit products and those behind phishing attacks.
