The history of UK domain names

Until May 1996 UK names were managed and allocated by a Naming Committee.  The committee was made up of members of the academic community which was the main user of internet at the time.  The committee had become unable to deal with the volume of registrations then being sought and so Nominet, a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee was set up.  The naming committee had a very restrictive set of criteria for domain names. Nominet was more flexible but charged for each name.  If I recall correctly the fee was for outright ownership at a one off cost (I don’t remember, it may have been £200 – adjusted for inflation that would be about £500 in 2025 money) that has subsequently become an annual fee paid through commercial name registrars like 123reg.com, typically under £20p.a. (they often offer names free or for a low introductory fee for the first year but then charge a lot more than they cost in subsequent years).

The committee didn’t allow registration of UK place names, Nominet did.  There was a news report that someone, noting this change in policy, made an application to buy thousands of UK place name based domain names.  That  was rejected. We had applied to the naming committee for sheffield.co.uk before the switch of responsibilities but the request was not processed. We were somewhat surprised to find that the outstanding list of requests was passed to Nominet who allocated the name to us.

At that time we’d already created a few web sites but with very unwieldy addresses provided by our web-hosting provider.  We were now able to buy domain names for our clients but the total cost of building a hand-coded HTML web site plus the domain name looked expensive at a time when few small businesses even had computers.  Fewer still had an internet connection, a dial up modem cost over £100 (after inflation, about £250 in 2025) and the user also needed commercial software to connect (Trumpet Winsock from IPswitch) and a web-browser to display web sites (Netscape Navigator about £40 – until Microsoft nearly put them out of business by releasing a free alternative).  A lot has changed in the ensuing decades!  The number of active .co.uk names in 1996 was in the low hundreds.
To help keep the cost down we offered those few brave customers like Sheffield’s famous retailer Chinese Fireworks, willing to take a chance on this newly emerging technology, an address like www.sheffield.co.uk/ChineseFireworks without the additional cost of their own domain name. When names became more affordable a couple of years later we migrated customers to their own names and it’s good to see that decades later and despite fierce competition from supermarkets chinesefireworks.co.uk is still Sheffield’s premier firework retailer and well known throughout the UK.