uk.co Domains Knocked Offline By Registrar Dispute

An anonymous reader writes "The .uk.co domain was wiped off the face of the Internet this morning with no notice, leaving more than 8,000 livid individuals and businesses - including Amazon and Priceline - with no Web presence or email. I saw this on nvnews.net, which originally came from the register, but since the domain is wiped out, you can no longer reach the article." Actually, you can read the story fine on theregister.co.uk. ;)

Comments

Re:Not true - or an exaggeration anyway

[$$$$$exyGal]

Agreed. I really doubt that Amazon or Priceline have been stricken with no Web presence or e-mail. Are there any companies that use a .uk.co domain for something besides misspellings?

--sex

Good riddance

[Stormie]

Just like it would be good riddance if the .au.com domains dropped off the internet. These scammers register a single .com domain for $15/year or whatever and then try so sell as many ".au.com" domains as they can, all pure profit, to suckers who couldn't get the .com.au domain they wanted.

Another way to lose your domain...

[Yoda2]

Did you know that ICANN requires you to have a physical address in your registrar record? Someone tried take one of my ".net" domains on a technicality because I had a P.O. Box listed. More info here.

Re:The Thought Process

[agentZ]

Now, if they could could just get rid of whitehouse.com, I'd have a lot more respect for the American government!

The US Government can't own or enforce a copyright or trademark, so they can't, by law, go after whitehouse.com. That being said, however, I'm sure the good folks at White House Apple Juice have other ideas!

So Castle.uk.co are fucked then.

[kyz]

Bye bye to Castle Technologies, Linux kernel pirates*. Why you couldn't just use castle.co.uk in the first place, we may never know.

*: ALLEGEDLY

this isn't true at all

[carpe_noctem]

From www.uk.co:

Since December 2002, we had offered to enter into a new arrangement with Net Registrar in order to safeguard your uk.co registrations with them for a short period of time to allow you sufficient time to transition to alternative domain names. ....

A Council of State decision in Colombia dated 12 July 2002 ordered the Minister of Communications in Colombia to take over the administration of .co top level domain names by no later than 31 December 2003.


They had been planning this since July, and while they were supposed to have done it on the 31st of December, they actually seem to have given all the .uk.co people nearly two months to find new domains. It's not like they just swept the rug out from underneath their feet as the reg's article seems to imply (though the article does mention that this was mandated last July).

Re:Why doesn't everyone just get a .com?

[droleary]

Heirarchies are a Good Thing, as any geek should know.

Only a poser geek, really (based on moderation you received, we clearly have a lot of those on /.). Hierarchies are actually a very bad thing because they obscure information. That is, in fact, what this whole story is about!

The real situation is this: we have companies in the United Kingdom that want to be found on the Internet. The problem is that there are two actual hierarchies in place that could be the root under which to file such a domain, those being .com and .uk. Then there are the "off" hierarchies that get used not because of their geographical location as intended, but because their abbreviation corresponds to some common usage (.co being the case here).

So the hierarchy adds to the confusion of both the user and the company. The company has to figure out and register domains in whatever branch of the hierarchy the user may have wandered into, and the user never learns how addressing on the Internet is supposed to work and so they continue to wander around without aim. Elimination of the hierarchy would go a long way to clearing up the confusion and getting back to the simple idea of looking for, among other things, a company in the UK.

Of course, nobody should expect that to happen any time soon. Getting rid of the hierarchy means getting rid of the need to create new top-level domains and therefore eliminates that ICANN profit center.

Re:Why doesn't everyone just get a .com?

[Anonymous Coward]

Long hierarchies are confusing to users. OTOH, a "monocline grouping" (cheesy term, I know, but it gets the point across) is very natural and straightforward.

A monocline grouping is essentially a two-level hierarchy; like car makes and models, brands and products, file folders and files, or menus and menu items. That's the reason (or one of 'em) that the CCTLDs that had been holding out for a complex city.region.category.tld naming system have been reluctantly converting to name.tld - a two-level hierarchy is ideal, from a UI perspective, and has many useful parallels in the real world.

Re:whitehouse.com

[raju1kabir]

Religion breeds terrorism.

WTF kind of sig is that? If it were "Islam breeds terrorism" you would be labeled as a bigot. Using the even broader word "Religion" just makes you an even bigger bigot.

Au contraire. Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" would be bigoted because it would require pointedly ignoring the fact that terrorism is in no way limited to Islam.

Religion as a whole, on the other hand, is responsible for the vast majority of terrorism and has been throughout history. Terrorism is irrational behavior that only thrives in the context of irrational worldviews.