A quarter of a century of .uk dispute records is moving to Geneva

4 July 2026 · Carl Heaton · Deep dive Commentary

This filing is part of a Steelwise deep dive into 25 years of .uk domain disputes, published as the service that decides them moves to WIPO on 7 July 2026.

Every decision about who owns a contested .uk domain name is a public document. Businesses cite them, experts build precedent on them, and anyone accused of squatting can read exactly how the last 5,525 cases went. From Tuesday, that record changes hands. The procedural side of the handover to WIPO is genuinely tidy, as we set out in the series opener. This filing is about the parts that are not: the record, the data, and the questions nobody has publicly answered.

The record is moving, and the old doors are closing

From 7 July, new decisions are published on the search engine of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency in Geneva. Nominet's own Decision Search Tool will be retired when its legacy systems are decommissioned. Nominet says that "eventually, all decisions will also be available on nominet.uk", which on its own account is an aspiration with no committed date.

The net effect: WIPO becomes the primary host of a 25-year quasi-judicial record, the British-hosted search is on a retirement path, and nobody has promised that existing decision URLs will keep working. That matters more than it sounds. The DRS case law is a citation network of 3,365 links, and two decades of legal articles, advice notes, and appeal arguments point at Nominet-hosted addresses. If those links rot, the record does not disappear, but it becomes measurably harder to find. It is also, candidly, why this series exists: we read and analysed the record while it was still easy to reach.

What "same service" leaves out

Nominet's framing, same policy, same experts, same mediation, same fees, is accurate at the procedural layer, and the fee change even runs slightly in users' favour once VAT falls away. But three substantive things do move to Geneva: the canonical public record, the case data, and the payment rail. The gap between "nothing changes" and those three moves is where the open questions live.

The contract is undisclosed. The administration fee Nominet pays WIPO, the contract length, and the exit provisions, including what happens to case data and the decision archive if the arrangement ends, are not public. The stated cost-saving rationale cannot be independently assessed without them.
The fee split is unexplained. WIPO's standard model splits each fee into an administration share and a panellist share. Nominet says party-facing fees are unchanged and that it pays WIPO an administration fee; whether the full £750 still reaches the expert has not been publicly reconciled.
The consultation channel is registrar-shaped. The DRS policy is due for review by 2027. Nominet's consultations to date have run through its registrar-facing channels, but the people the DRS actually serves, complainants and respondents, often have no registrar relationship at all.

The data protection question

The sharpest open question concerns personal data, and it deserves careful wording, because it is easy to overstate and just as easy to wave away.

From Tuesday, administering .uk disputes means WIPO processes the personal data of UK parties: case files, evidence, and identity and contact details. WIPO is a United Nations specialised agency that holds privileges and immunities and reserves them in its own contractual terms. UK GDPR restricts transfers of personal data to international organisations under its Chapter V rules, the same rules that govern sending data to a foreign company. Switzerland holds a UK adequacy decision, but adequacy attaches to the Swiss legal order, and an immune international organisation is not straightforwardly a Swiss data controller subject to Swiss law and Swiss regulators.

We are not saying the transfer is unlawful, and the fair question is not even whether the rules apply. It is a practical one: if a UK respondent wanted to exercise their data rights against a body that reserves immunity from legal process, how exactly would they do it, and if the usual machinery does not reach that body, what protects them instead?

Nominet is not an outlier here, which makes the question bigger, not smaller. EURid, the EU body that runs .eu, has offered WIPO as a dispute provider since 2017, under full EU GDPR. Yet we could find no registry, Nominet included, that has publicly set out its transfer basis for routing case data to WIPO, or addressed the immunity point. Absence of a published mechanism is not proof none exists. But a quasi-judicial function handling UK and EU residents' personal data has moved to an immune international organisation, and no one involved has publicly shown their working.

What would resolve this

None of it need be sinister; registries change systems all the time, and WIPO has administered domain disputes since 1999. But a public record and the personal data inside it deserve explicit answers, ideally before the switch rather than after: a committed date for the archive's return to nominet.uk, preservation of existing decision URLs, publication of the exit provisions for the case data, and a plain statement of the UK GDPR transfer basis. Until then, the honest status of each is: open.

The series

About the data. The handover facts in this filing come from Nominet's and WIPO's public materials, cross-checked against independent coverage; the legal position is described as unresolved because it is. The dispute figures come from our analysis of all 5,525 published DRS decisions.

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

The record is moving, and the old doors are closing

What "same service" leaves out

The data protection question

What would resolve this

The series

Further reading