Since July 1, second-level domains have been available in the .UK ccTLD. As is well-known, for a long time, only third-level domains could be registered in Britain. In 2014, Nominet, the registry that oversees the ccTLD, decided to change the situation and provide an opportunity to register second-level domains. A five-year transition period was approved. For example, only the owners of domainname.org.uk or domainname.co.uk were able to register domainname.uk.
The transition period ended on June 24, and since July 1, everyone has been able to register the remaining second-level domains. According to Domain Name Wire citing Nominet’s stats, over 41,000 second-level domains were registered in .UK during the first week. Short names, in particular those consisting of one letter only, were the most popular. Z.uk was the most contested name with 80 registrars competing for it. Other popular names included law.uk, k.uk and wedding.uk. There were over 1.8 million domain names available in total, with the number of second-level domains in .UK being about 3.7 million.
