UK registry, Nominet, faces split
Posted in: Domain Names at 21/11/2008 07:49
When the government talks about "critical national infrastructure", for most of us it brings to mind images of guarded nuclear facilities, choked railways and failing banks. But now, on a business park on the outskirts of Oxford, a keystone of the modern economy is the subject of an increasingly bitter power struggle that could trigger a Whitehall power grab at the independent heart of the UK internet.
Nominet is the not-for-profit company founded in 1996 to run the UK internet registry, when demand for domain names soared. Every time we click a link or type a web address containing .co.uk, .org.uk and other UK-centric suffixes we're connected to the correct website thanks to Nominet's database. In August, it celebrated registering its its seven millionth domain name, for a driving school in Ilford.
To read this story in full in The Guardian, see www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/20/nominet-domain-name-registry.
