UK Parliament Domain Without Registrar

asobala writes "According to this story at The Register, the UK parliament is using the domain www.parliament.uk. It's a top-level domain because it was registered before August 1996, before Nominet handled .uk domains. But since there is no registrar, they can't prove that they own it."

Comments

Time to think

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a time to think why USA doesn't use .us and com.us, org.us, ac.us, gov.us more often.

This is 2003. It's not 1988 when USA had 90% of the inet.

Is it a flame bait? Or is a bait to all sane people the fact that I stress?

Re:Time to think

[Anonymous Coward]

Its simple: The US invented it, lock, stock and barrel. Well, not exactly. Al Gore did. But, he is an American.

The naming conventions in use now have been in use in the US for 20+ years. Changing existing addresses would be confusing, add little value, and would largely be an exercise in political correctness. Anyone is largely free to use the existing tlds if they want to register. The country domains have been popular as a means of differentiating a domain, and associating it with a place, not necessarily because they have to. There are .us addresses in use, but it is mainly local governments and schools. (I will also add that it used to be tied to an inconvenient geographic naming convention.)

You could treat our use of the current naming conventions as a minor tribute for funding and developing the internet. Or, if it makes you feel any better, you can view it as implied that .gov, .mil, .com, .org, .net, .etc, ;) are .us addresses. Or, we're just keeping .gov warm until the One World Government demands it.

Of course, I suppose that the day will come when America will be bashed for internet address imperialism. Our unbounded use of domain names outside of .us will be viewed as an act of aggression and yet another reason to hate us. Demands will come that we retreat back inside the borders of .us.

Ah, well, ... if the world doesn't like it, I guess we could just take our internet and go home.

Of course that would lead to howls about American pr0n embargos, and threats of trade sanctions until we reopen the internet pr0n pipes. Of course, there will be world-wide joy AND rage over both actions. Violence will ensue. Counter-violence will follow the violence.

Sigh. I guess we can't win.

The only reasonably safe course of action is to not change anything.

Re:Time to think

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a multinational. All of our domains are .com or .net. For example, the servers we have in London got .co.uk as an afterthought.

It's not just the US that uses .com, it's the whole globe.

The only exception (in our case) is Japan... always .co.jp. I dunno why, maybe that's preferred in Japan.

Re:.co.uk

[abardsley]

The .de thing is just a choice by the registrar.
Nominet chooses to have the subdomains (which is
fair enough).

Using UK rather than GB is an historical accident, but I usu. feel compelled to point it out ;)

As for countries selling there domains, well, that's their choice.

Re:Several options to solve this problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

if someone hacked your DNS and it wasn't noticed, they could specify a certificate authority other than your's and no one would notice.

SSL works on a basis of trust.

Lots of Domains Like This.

[ClickNMix]

If you read the article you might come across the section that sats:

there was no contract between Nominet and the registrants of domain names registered by the "Naming Committee" - the loose assortment of tech-heads that existed prior to Nominet.

Since, at one point you didnt have to pay for .co.uk domains, you just submitted to the commitee, and if they liked you they voted that you could have the domain and use it. (There might be more to it, I was only 16 when the ISP I was working for was doing this!! - But I do belive thats the gist)

There was also a 'limbo' of about 24 hours when the Naming commity handed over to Nominet, where people could register anything (No more voting by the committee), for free(Because Nominet werent charing yet).. but there is no paper work of any kind for these domains. (One of which I own - But cann't prove and not sure how to go about getting it back into my full control!)

There's also been several court cases I know about because of this lack of paperwork, and people selling domains they may or may not have been the owners off.

Since you never have to pay for these domains, you dont even have the invoices, no renewal fees etc. They just exist. Some are no doubt lost forever because people have just left them behind, and theres nothing to remind anyone about them.