A bit late, too little, and the wrong kind to boot

Well, that's one way to solve it. Had they had an inkling of competence in this field they would've known that for the move to be credible it would have had to have happened before the mass suspension, not after people complained. In fact, for proper governance it would have had to have been in their charter from the start.

``Nominet's operations director Eleanor Bradley said: "Nominet is committed to making the internet a safe place for all users.''

Frankly, that isn't their job. Just like it isn't the vehicle registration database's job to pull registrations on hear-say the vehicle might've possibly been used in anything seemingly or actually untoward. It's not nominet's job to play the police. They're not setup for it and there's no legal cadre to make even a smidge of justice and due process a reality. Instead they're opening the front gates wide for abuse of this policing tool.

This is several thousand different kinds of idiotic

And probably a bit dangerous too.

"looking at other domain names or sites held by the customer, re-checking the credit card details or even checking the originating IP address from which the domain name purchase was made"

Sure, these methods will tell you for sure whether a site contains illegal material or not. I foresee a whole world of pain for Nominet and/or registrars as they will be stuck between lawsuits for locking legitimate websites and lawsuits for _not_ locking fraudulent ones. I mean, they're responsible for any illegal content on a .uk domain now aren't they?

Also it'll be interesting to see where they stop... will "suspicion of illegal activities" stop at online pharmacies and phishing sites or will they also take into account "extreme porn", "domestic terrorism" and the like? I'd bet my shirt on this being wildly abused.

If Labour............

had there way there would be no need for Courts or Judges because everyone would be guilty ,of something, until proven innocent.

As for BERR taking over a private non profit company, I would be interested to hear if any other Nominet members are up for issuing legal proceedings on that point.

labour.org.uk

"Britain's democratic socialist party led by Gordon Brown. The values Labour stands for today, social justice, ..."

Sounds pretty fraudulent to me - where do I report it again?

DNS only?

"The lock means suspect websites will still be available if the content itself is not taken down, but only by typing in the IP address."

Erm, so they are deleting the DNS record and that's it? How long would it take for a miscreant to register a new one and point it at the old IP?

Still, as heavy handed as this sounds, it's probably still within Nominets TOS so it's not really anything to do with the police.

not a new feature at all

Errm, this isn't a new feature at all. It's been available to Nominet's registrars for around 6 months or so. It completely locks the domain so that no changes can be to the registrant details, nameserver delegation, and stops it being cancelled while it is under investigation.

Good news for the crooks

Hack your competitor's web site, plant dodgy data, then report it. Time it for their busiest period, and watch them lose all their customers.

Viruses

It all depends what they're locking down. If they're getting rid of the domains of BitTorrent tracking sites, that's one thing. But if they're getting rid of domains used by viruses to take control of people's computers, that should be done as quickly as possible. There should be no botnets out there.

"only by typing in the IP address"

I'd imagine there aren't many websites beyond the biggest corporations that aren't running more than one per IP address. Users wishing to access most sites would therefore not only have to type the IP address, but also create their own hand-crafted HTTP requests to include the hostname.