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.