The .uk domain dispute service changes hands on Tuesday

· Carl Heaton · Deep dive Infrastructure

If your business owns a .uk domain name, the referee that settles fights over those names changes on Tuesday. From 7 July 2026, new domain disputes are filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency in Geneva, instead of with Nominet, the UK registry that has run the service since 2001. For most businesses nothing needs doing. But the change is bigger than the announcement suggests, and it is worth five minutes of your attention.

What the service is

Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) is the way you get a .uk domain back from someone who should not have it, without going to court. A complainant has to prove two things: that it has rights in the name, usually a trade mark or a trading history, and that the registration is abusive in the other party's hands. Mediation is free. If mediation fails, an independent expert decides the case for a fee of £750, or £200 for a fast-track summary decision when the other side does not respond. Court action for the same result costs vastly more.

Since 2001 the service has produced 5,525 published decisions, and we have spent the past weeks analysing every one of them. This filing is the practical summary; the rest of the series digs into what 25 years of decisions actually show.

What changes on 7 July

According to Nominet's announcement and WIPO's, the administration moves to WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center. From Tuesday:

  • New complaints are submitted through WIPO's website, not Nominet's.
  • Payment is made through WIPO, not Nominet.
  • New decisions are published on WIPO's decision search engine.

Cases filed before 7 July stay with Nominet until they finish. One hard deadline: Nominet says draft complaints sitting unsubmitted in Nominet Online Services will be permanently deleted unless submitted before Monday 6 July.

What stays the same

Nominet frames the move as a change of administrator only, and at the procedural level that holds. The DRS Policy is unchanged. The same independent panel of experts decides cases, chaired as before by Nick Gardner. Nominet staff still run the free mediation stage. The fee schedule is unchanged: £200 for a summary decision, £750 for a full decision, £3,000 for an appeal, all previously quoted excluding VAT.

There is one genuinely counter-intuitive detail. Because payment moves to WIPO, Nominet states that no VAT will be applied. VAT-registered businesses reclaimed it anyway, so they see no change. But individuals and small unregistered traders currently pay £900 for a full decision, and from Tuesday they pay £750. The switch to Geneva makes the service slightly cheaper, and cheaper precisely for the smallest complainants.

What to do

  • If you were preparing a complaint in Nominet's system, submit it before Monday 6 July or start again with WIPO.
  • If you have a live case, it stays with Nominet to the end. Nothing changes.
  • If someone is squatting a name you have rights in, the route still works, and the odds are strongly in your favour if the facts are. From Tuesday, you start at WIPO.

The series

The handover is why we did the analysis. The rest of this deep dive series is what we found:

If you spot an error in this filing, tell us and we will correct it and note the change.

Further reading

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