Nominet has always taken seriously its responsibility to reduce abuse and harms originating from the .UK namespace. We’re proud that .UK remains one of the most trusted internet domains, and we’re equally proud of our social impact investments made over many years in educational and preventive programmes.
Nominet’s strategy sets out an ambition for a .UK domain free from abuse and online harms. Key to that is a new Domain Health Initiative (DHI) that will build upon and improve the work we started nearly a decade ago.
We first shared Domain Health Initiative at the Managed Partner Meeting in April 2025, and believe it plays an important part in making .UK free of domain abuse and online harms.
DHI will initially focus on reduction of abuse in .UK. To that end, Nominet is setting itself the following ambitious mission:
To make .UK the most trusted namespace through proactive, proportionate, and collaborative measures. We seek to achieve systemic deterrence against abuse, while preserving the openness and accessibility of the domain space.
Our objective is a healthy domain, which we believe is a win for our registrars and for Nominet too. We want DHI to improve and sustain our registrars’ businesses by reducing fraud, minimising online harms, and improving renewals rates.
What is domain health initiative?
Domain Health Initiative is an evolution of our current Domain Health scheme (Domain Health – Registrar Resources ) which has successfully flagged malicious domains to .UK registrars since 2016. We have seen abuse itself and the attitude towards tackling it change significantly since then – with both ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and Base Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Registry Agreement (RA) strengthened to mitigate DNS abuse.
We will be replacing existing Domain Health reports that are currently available to .UK registrars. The new reports will offer a consistent format enabling registrars to quickly review and take action. Alongside this, we will provide broader abuse insights than before, supporting registrars to make informed decisions, enabling them to proactively prevent and address abuse effectively.
We recognise it’s important to start a conversation with .UK registrars and our members on the best way to approach this important problem of domain abuse. We are looking for help to shape the initiative. Registrars will play a critical role in this initiative – and we will seek to evolve its implementation throughout 2025 in collaboration with our partners and members. We know collaboration and transparency will allow us to build greater capability and capacity across the .UK space to combat online harms – and in doing so, further our desire for a secure and safer internet. Further details about the initiative will be released throughout 2025.
We will be discussing our Domain Health Initiative in upcoming member and registrar meetings – where we will seek comment and feedback to refine our approach. To find out more, sign up for our Domain Abuse webinar taking place on Tuesday, 13th May at 14:00.
Author: Mayuresh Walke – Head of Customer Success & Operations