AS8683 NOMINET

Nominet UK (NOMINET) is the registry for the .uk top-level domain — the

not-for-profit company that runs the .uk namespace and the authoritative DNS

behind it. This AS carries Nominet's own registry and DNS infrastructure.

What it's used for

• Registry systems and authoritative name service. Sampled rDNS lands on Nominet's own core estate (nominet.org.uk firewalls and switches, datacentre device names), not on any customer or subscriber population.
• About 9,500 IPv4 addresses across a handful of RIPE prefixes, plus a notably large IPv6 footprint (roughly as many v6 prefixes as v4) — the shape of a DNS operator rather than an access network.
• Every announced block is registered to Nominet itself (NOMINET-CORE-DC1-*, NOMINET-DCB netnames, GB).

Notable

• This is critical-infrastructure address space with no honest classification in a hosting/ISP vocabulary: it is neither an eyeball network, a hosting provider, nor a transit carrier. It is deliberately left unclassified rather than forced into one, in the same way root-DNS and IXP ASNs are.
• Nominet peers widely (dozens of BGP neighbours) despite its small address count, which is what an anycast DNS platform looks like.

Interesting

• Beyond .uk, Nominet has operated registry back-end and protective-DNS services for other parties, so a query hitting this space is not necessarily a .uk lookup.