The Nominet Board has approved a request from the Judicial Office and the Cabinet Office to allow the judiciary its own closed second level domain (SLD), judiciary.uk.

Currently, the judiciary are provided for under the Government’s second level domain, .gov.uk. Creating judiciary.uk will ensure that the domain name reflects the judiciary’s independence from government, as enshrined in the Constitutional Reform Act, 2005.

Nominet is proposing to re-label the relevant parts of the existing .gov.uk SLD to the new .judiciary.uk. As a closed domain, this SLD would operate under the same restrictions as .gov.uk.  Due to the unique nature of the request, the usual SLD policy was not considered appropriate in this instance.

Nominet is encouraging feedback from stakeholders on this issue. Any objections should be submitted to sld@nominet.org.uk within the next 30 days.

Nominet is also asking stakeholders for their opinion on the desirability of a review of Nominet’s SLD policy.  More information is available here and submit your views to policy@nominet.org.uk. Responses to this will feed into Nominet’s .uk policy process.

To register your .UK domain name, check out Europe Registry here.