The Nominet Registry, which manages the UK ccTLD .UK, has published details of cybersquatting complaints received and reviewed over the past year. The Dispute Resolution Service (DRS), which operates within the registry, has the exclusive right to resolve domain disputes in the UK ccTLD. During the past year, it accepted 548 complaints about consideration. This is the lowest number in the entire 20-year history of the DRS service.
It is also noteworthy that only 43% of all proceedings resulted in decisions to place domain names under the control of the plaintiffs. This indicator has also been constantly decreasing in recent years, so in 2018 it was 49%, in 2019 - 47%, and in 2020 - 46%. This situation is in stark contrast to the global trend: for example, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the number of complaints filed under the Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) is growing from year to year. “Despite the global increase in online activity due to the pandemic and the increase in the number of complaints handled by WIPO, we have not seen an increase in the number of complaints against .UK domains in recent years,” said Nick Wenban-Smith, General Counsel of Nominet. “Hopefully this is part of our ongoing efforts to make the .UK domain a safe place to be on the global web.”
The Domain Incite resource, reporting this news, explains that the UK national domain has rather strict blocking rules. Thus, the Nominet registry blocks domain names at the request of the intellectual property crime departments of the British police. And quite possibly, for this reason, in many cases, the matter simply does not reach the filing and consideration of complaints.
