Central Office of Information

The complainant requested a list of all .gov.uk domain names from the Central Office of Information (COI). COI initially responded to the request by informing the complainant that it did not hold the requested information. During the Commissioner’s investigation COI confirmed that it did hold a subset of the gov.uk domain names, which it used for its own business purposes. However, COI considered this information to be reasonably accessible to the complainant and was therefore subject to the exemption provided by section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The Commissioner is satisfied that section 21 does apply to the information held by COI and has not therefore upheld the complaint. He does nevertheless find that COI made a number of procedural breaches of the Act by its handling of the request.