Part 3 of 3. Response times instead of outcomes, a liability cap set at the fees you already paid, and a provider whose excuses eventually arrive at you. The questions that flush it out, what a genuine one does instead, and what it takes to get rid of a bad one.
IPv6 has been finished, free and switched on by default in every operating system for the best part of twenty years. The UK’s answer was carrier-grade NAT, a law about logging, and a £5 a month charge to give you back the address you used to have. I counted every UK network in the global routing table to find out who has actually turned IPv6 on — 1,200 of them have not, and 463 of those are sitting on address space they asked for and never used.
The .uk registry is owned by its members, and in March 2021 they voted half the board out. What the estate actually looked like from inside, why running .uk alongside dozens of gTLDs shaped how it was run, and how a registry with no regulator ended up disciplined by the only people who could.