.uk

.uk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom. It was first registered in July 1985, seven months after the original generic top-level domains such as .com and the first country code after .us. it is the fifth most popular top-level domain worldwide (after .com, .cn, .de and .net), with over 10 million registrations. uk has used OpenDNSSEC since March 2010. Internet in the United Kingdom#History and Nominet UK#History In October 1984, RFC 920 set out the creation of ccTLDs using country codes derived from the corresponding two-letter code in the ISO 3166-1 list. "GB" is the UK's ISO 3166 country code. However, the UK academic network Name Registration Scheme, JANET NRS, had defined "UK" as the top-level domain a few months before the compilation of the ISO-derived list. Consequently, .uk was chosen and registered on 24 July 1985. .gb was reserved but never widely used and it is no longer possible to register domains under that ccTLD. As with other ccTLDs in the early days it was originally delegated by Jon Postel to a "trusted person" to manage. Andrew McDowell at UCL was assigned .uk, the first country code delegation. In time, he passed it to Willie Black at the UK Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA). Originally, domain requests were emailed, manually screened by and then forwarded to the UK Naming Committee before being processed by UKERNA. Membership of this committee was restricted to a group of high-end ISPs who were part of a formal peering arrangement. The Naming Committee was organised as a mailing list to which all proposed names were circulated. The members would consider the proposals under a ruleset that insisted that all domain names should be very close if not identical to a registered business name of the registrant. Members of the Naming Committee could object to any name, and if at least a small number of objections were received, the name was refused.