Slashdot Mirror
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."
I should hurry up and sue, and get my website back!!!
It is well known that parliament.uk is rightfully the property of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic.
Are you kidding me?!
Everyone knows they are just a bunch of cybersquaters who registered parliament.uk so all the people who don't know how to spell it the right way (Parlament) will get to their site.
oh wait... that is the right spelling? never mind.
Yeah, I own slashdot.org, I registered it back in 1954 before Al Gore invented the internet. I DEMAND you hand the domain over to me!!
soon they won't even be able to prove it exists.
Well, short of going in and holding a gun to Thwate's head, they have several options, as I see it:
/(.*) to www.parliment.govt.uk/$1.
1. Setup www.parliment.govt.uk, and have the webserver that handles www.parliment.uk redirect
2. Sign their own cert.
3. Farm out the credit card transactions themselves to another site.
I guess if they got smart about it they could go through some sort of legal process that confirms that they have "ownership" of the netblock that the DNS servers for parliment.uk are on, and therefore they are the defacto owners (posession is 9/10ths of the law?) of parliment.uk.
Nonetheless, an interesting situation.
Doesn't anybody stop to think that the UK parliament might *implicitly* own the domain www.parliament.uk because they've been using it since before 1996? If they haven't registered it then nobody else has either, so nobody else is more apt to acquire it. And I'm sure somebody else wants it. I don't have a receipt for that pair of boots I bought in 1998. Maybe somebody else owns them even though I've been wearing them for the past 5 years. Come to think about it, I'm going out to buy a new pair of boots. Come on, give us some good articles to talk about.
We don't want the Royal Marines raiding the VA Software headquarters looking for alleged terrorists Abdul Hemos and the commander of the cell, Hashish Taco.
I know that co stands for commercial but why doesn't Nominet allow plain .uk to be registered anymore?
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
In fact, no one runs parliament.uk and it doesn't officially exist. OK, go on, you twisted my arm. For a mere £78k per annum, and a lifetime seat in the House of Lords, I'll oversee the running of this tld.
:)
Obviously, I'll need a 155Mb pipe, and all the leggy blondes I can eat. (So to speak.) Oh, and a nice quiet office somewhere
Get your own free personal location tracker
Of course, the question should be why doesn't the UK use its *real* ISO country code GB instead of UK.
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?
They say that possession is 9/10 of the law. I think the fact that they've had the domain for 9 years should be proof enough that they own it.
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
It was this about reading the articles... (-8
They were trying to register an SSL certificate with Thawte, and Thawte needed them to prove it was their own domain. Nobody could actually prove that..
So, in this case, it's up to them to prove that they are entitled to it, though nobody forces them to. They can just not sign up with Thawte..
You misunderstand.
Nominet controls the uk. TLD and most of the xxx.uk. SLDs.
Nominet doesn't control parliament.uk. The authoritive name servers for uk. (Nominet's servers) return NS delegation records for parliament.uk., and those servers do not appear to be Nominet servers. Therefore, Parliament controls it's own SLD.
Why this is difficult to deal with I don't know. Nominet should only have to confirm to Thawte that Parliament owns the SLD. Nominet controls uk. and, in turn, the UK government controls parliament.uk., what's the problem here?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
There was a discussion about this on the Nominet mailing lists recently. The most convincing reason is Northern Ireland.
.uk, the powers that be decided on using .uk for British domains, and it's stuck ever since.
The official name of the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. "Great Britain" is the island that includes England, Wales, Scotland and the multitude of little islands, which includes the Isle of Wight (part of England), the Isle of Man (not really part of the UK at all), and doesn't include the Channel Islands (which are closest to Normandy, which the French refer to as the Anglo-Norman islands, but otherwise are as British as the Isle of Man).
"GB" would be a useful code, except that it excludes Northern Ireland, and if you've followed Northern Irish history at all you'll know that the the protestants / Unionists in Northern Ireland are very fond of being part of the UK, and would vehemently protest to the UK being known by a code, "GB", that explicitly did not include them.
So, way before ICANN's official policy to use the ISO country codes for ccTLDs, and even though Ukraine had a strong claim to