December 2024 Update
UK standardisation and modernisation update
Following our consultation earlier in the year the team are working on further details of the standardisation of .UK.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: WHOIS & DAC UPDATE
We had proposed sunset of WHOIS/DAC at the end of January 2025 however we are postponing the proposed end-of-life date for .UK WHOIS and the .UK Domain Availability Checker to aid with a smooth transition experience based on current usage models of these tools.
WHAT COMES NEXT?
Our technology teams are currently working hard on the finishing touches to our Enterprise Platform Renewal which ensures our underlying platform surpasses modern Critical National Infrastructure standards. The next few months will be focused on extensive testing for the move of the registry application suite onto the new hardware which we aim to complete by the end of May 2025. This change should be seamless to users with no functional changes during this time.
Our development teams will shortly be starting work on some of the software upgrades to the Registry Services platform proposed in the .UK standardisation and modernisation consultation. Whilst the transition of the production registry between platforms will be done on a set date when all the changes will come into effect, we aim to deliver the testing environment in functional stages to enable the critical development work for registrars to have even more preparation time.
| What? | Detail | Expected calendar quarter |
| EPP Check | The legacy .UK platform removed hard restrictions on the utilisation of the EPP Check command in June 2024. EPP Check command is now the recommended alternative to the Domain Availability Checker and can be used today. The result of the command returns the exact time a dropping domain will be available for re-registration meaning registrars can cache results with confidence. The same time is provided on the drop lists. Usage of EPP is subject to our EPP Acceptable Usage Policy. | Complete |
| Unavailable names report | As a direct result of feedback in the consultation, we will be upgrading the .UK experience for registrars so that they can pre-cache a daily ‘unavailable names’ report within their registrar system. This report will also include drop times for domains which have started their drop process. We will continue to generate existing drop lists alongside this new report. The provision of this report enables streamlining the registrant experience for those registrars who utilise it by no longer requiring queries direct to the registry systems to generate available name options but being able to rule out most known unavailable names whilst enabling faster spinning of alternative .UK names that could be available. A draft of the proposed report structure is supplied below for feedback. | Q2 2025 |
| Consultation and Feedback | The 2024 policy consultation focused on key behavioural areas of registry systems and process and has made some changes to the way in which contractual elements need to interact. We therefore plan to release some further updates in Q1 and Q2 2025, namely:
| Q1 & Q2 2025 |
| .UK OT&E on RSP platform v1 | We plan to iterate releases of our .UK Registry Services Provider (RSP) OT&E environment to ensure the core features are available for testing as early as possible. The first release will include an upgraded version of our RSP EPP environment with RFC9154 included. | Q3 2025 |
| .UK OT&E on RSP platform upgrade v2 | We will have a second release of the new .uk RSP OT&E testbed which brings with it additional EPP functionality. For those registrars who have resellers or seek to comply with a privacy/proxy service implementation we will have a second release of EPP testbed which will include Organisation RFCs RFC8543 and RFC8544 and updates to the EPP Status reasons. An upgrade of our EPP Fee extension to be compliant with RFC8748. As .uk only has one price point, the primary benefit and use case is to ensure your systems have visibility of your outstanding balance and credit limit on your account. Set of EPP notifications. In addition to EPP, we will release a testbed environment to test the credentialed RDAP search operations for those who currently utilise our APIs to access information about domains on their accreditation. | Q4 2025 |
| WHOIS and DAC retirement | Changes were made to the .UK EPP Check command in June 2024 to allow its use as the primary source of up-to-date availability and remove the hard limitations. We expect to allow the pre-caching of unavailable names list in Q2 2025; and after a period of concurrent running, we now intend to retire the WHOIS and DAC in Q4 2025 which will allow registrars to time to start integrating with both the current EPP check command and the new unavailable names report. | Q4 2025 |
| Transition | The go-live of .UK on our modern Registry Services Platform will be a point of time switch over between one platform and we expect to make that switch approximately 6 months after the testbed release to enable registrars time for their resellers to integrate. | Q2 2026 |
Over the timeline we will gradually start ramping up our engagement and communication as information and details are finalised to ensure registrars are able to update their registrant guidance, technical systems and internal training to ensure a smooth transition.
Unavailable Names report draft specification
The format of our unavailable names report is based on the draft at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sattler-unavailable-domain-report-03 but extended to include information about drop time and will be a CSV with the following columns:
| Column | Value |
| TLD | One of: uk co.uk org.uk ltd.uk plc.uk me.uk net.uk |
| Domain | Full domain name, e.g. ‘example.uk’ |
| Status | One of: ‘REGISTERED’ – if a domain is unavailable because it is currently registered. ‘REGISTERED – May Drop’ – if the domain is in the redemption grace period but can still be renewed. ‘Drop’ – if the domain is in the RFC3915 pending delete grace period and will become available for re-registration. ‘REGISTRY RESERVED’ – if a domain is unavailable because it is currently reserved by Nominet. |
| Drop Time | Empty if the domain is not scheduled to drop. The drop time in UTC of when a domain will become available for re-registration if it is not restored or renewed. |
Feedback on this draft specification is encouraged by 2nd February 2025. Feedback can be submitted to [email protected].
Minerva House, Edmund Halley Road, Oxford Science Park, OX4 4DQ, United Kingdom