25 years of .uk domain disputes

Why we did this

The Dispute Resolution Service, or DRS, is the process that settles arguments about who should hold a .uk domain name. If someone registers a name that looks like your brand, the DRS is how you get it back, without going to court. It ran for 25 years, decided thousands of cases, and built up a body of reasoning that shapes every new dispute. Almost nobody outside the domain industry has read it.

On 7 July 2026 the service moved to WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, in Geneva. That handover was the prompt. Before it happened, we read the published record end to end and worked out what a quarter of a century of decisions actually says about how these cases are won and lost.

How we did it

Nominet published each DRS decision as a public document, and maintained a search tool over them. We analysed all 5,525 published decisions, from the first in 2001 to the most recent at the time of writing, dated 1 July 2026. The analysis covered the outcome of each case, the parties involved, the reasoning given, and the citations decisions made to earlier decisions.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, this covers published decisions only: cases settled before a decision, or withdrawn, leave no public record, so they are outside the count. Second, the DRS is not a court. Its decisions are not binding precedent in the legal sense, even though, as we found, they cite each other constantly and behave a great deal like precedent in practice.

The public record itself belongs to Nominet, and from July 2026 is hosted by WIPO. We link to the source throughout the filings below rather than reproducing it.

What we found

• Typosquatters lose 98% of the time. Registering a near-miss of somebody's brand is close to an automatic loss. Holders of ordinary dictionary words usually keep them, and three-letter domains are close to a coin flip.
• Who you are predicts the outcome. Large brands win 95% of disputes or better. Individuals win 64%. The gap is wide enough to matter, and it is not obviously explained by the merits.
• The service grew its own case law. With no statute and no judges, decisions accumulated 3,365 citations, anchored on about a dozen home-grown rulings. The foundational cases are mostly ones the brands lost.
• The .uk land-grab happened twice. When Nominet opened direct .uk registrations in 2014, the obvious names were reserved for their .co.uk holders for five years. In the month that protection lapsed, disputes surged, and they were overwhelmingly naked brand grabs.
• One respondent never lost. Across 14 years and 28 complaints, a single respondent won every case brought against them.

The filings, in reading order

These were published as seven separate filings. Chronologically they are all dated 4 July 2026, but they are best read in this order rather than by date.

1. The quiet tribunal that ran the .uk internet for 25 years. Start here: the overview, the shape of the whole record, and how the service changed over time.
2. What decides a .uk domain dispute: the story, not the paperwork. The practical one. What actually wins and loses cases.
3. Who wins the fight for a .uk name (and the man who never lost). Win rates by who you are, and the respondent with a perfect record.
4. The case law nobody voted for. How a body of precedent formed without anyone designing one.
5. The .uk land-grab happened twice, and the second one was scheduled. What the 2014 rollout and its 2019 cliff-edge did to dispute volume.
6. The .uk domain dispute service changes hands on Tuesday. What the WIPO handover changed for anyone holding a .uk name.
7. A quarter of a century of .uk dispute records is moving to Geneva. What happens to the public record itself, and the questions the move leaves open.

If you have a dispute now

Since 7 July 2026, disputes over .uk domain names are filed with WIPO in Geneva rather than with Nominet. The policy, the experts, and the fees stayed broadly the same. The handover filing covers what changed and what did not.

If you are weighing whether a complaint is worth bringing, what decides a .uk domain dispute is the most useful place to start. It sets out the patterns that separate the cases that succeed from the ones that do not.

Questions about this research

If you are a journalist, researcher, or practitioner and want to discuss the method or the findings, email [email protected]. If you are a business with a domain problem, the contact page is the place to start.