What a register cannot tell you, and what people read into it anyway

It tells you what a company is permitted to do and when the permission started. It does not tell you whether the company is solvent, whether it pays quickly, whether it restricts winning accounts, what its prices are like, or whether anybody has ever complained about it.

The register is an administrative record of permissions, and the regulator keeps other things — enforcement actions, settlements, published fines — in separate places entirely. A licence being active means no permission has been withdrawn. It does not mean nothing has happened.

It is also a snapshot. Statuses change, domains are added and dropped, and companies surrender licences without announcing it. A copy downloaded a year ago is a description of a year ago.

That is also the expensive part. The most common misuse is treating the register as a rating. It has no ranking, no score and no opinion, and a page that turns it into one has added the opinion itself.

What to do with it. Use it to answer the one question it answers — is this permitted, by whom, since when — and go somewhere else for every other question.