This leads me on to the Nominet consultation on the future of .uk as a domain that is worthy of the trust placed in it by those who do not know better. I have once again been shocked, but not surprised, at the narrow vision of those seeking to preserve the current, "untrustworthy because unvalidated", registration processes which make it almost impossible to work out whether a website is governed by UK law unless it actually abides by the e-Commerce and gives physical contact details on its website. It would appear, at least to me, to be obvious that Nominet should have a policy of routinely suspending " .uk" domain names that are being used for trading purposes where neither the website nor the "whois" entry gives current physical contact details. It should also demand such information from all new .co.uk registrations. The extensions with new names and hierarchies of names are, quite frankly, much less important.
How Nominet implements that policy is another matter - but unless and until it does so we cannot expect .uk to be taken seriously as part of the process of making the UK a trustworthy location for on-line business. More-over the 2/3 rd of Small Firms who have websites but decline to transact on line because of fear of fraud are all too rational in their choice. Given that most of the Nominet community of registrars make most of their money from providing hosting and support services to small and medium sized businesses, not from handling registrations, let alone from farming domain names, this should be a no-brainer for their finance directors.
Given all the e-mails that small firm receive from "HMRC" (and look-alikes) offering them refunds or other assistance, there is a need to link the RTI pilots to a realistic, large scale exercise to address on-line fraud, including reporting and victim support, - not just another "awareness campaign" as currently appears planned. Any such exercise should include robust "co-operation" with Nominet to identify any in the .uk supply chain who are aiding and abetting such frauds and to take action accordingly. It should also include an equally "robust" contribution from HMG (who, Cabinet Office, BIS, DCMS ?) to the Nominet Consultation with regard to the current surreal debate on the forty or so "reserved names" for the quangos being kicked off .gov.uk
It is bizarre that the future of a critical part of the UK Internet infrastructure should be left to an introverted group of registrars with an understandable interest in resisting change, while others appear to have an equally narrow interest in opportunity to sell new names.
