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Shorter '.uk' Domain Name Put On Ice
judgecorp writes "The British domain name registry, Nominet, has abandoned the idea of a shorter .uk domain name system, which would replace the current regime where all .uk domains are in subdomains, such as .co.uk, or .org.uk. Although a consultation found a huge demand for a simpler system, Nominet couldn't get agreement on how to get there from here — so has put the idea to one side for now. There are some shorter addreses like british-library.uk — but these predate Nominet's regime."
There will not be a motherf.uk
I would think that it wouldn't have been lost on anyone the problem with websites ending in F or S. Or even Y. Co.uk just doesn't have the same naming problems.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
What ?? Registered national porn ? Where are you living ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The Australian government provided a list. Thanks, Steve.
What on earth is national porn? (outside of .jp, that is)
That is great idea but I would also want:
xxx.org.[country_code] for non-profit porn.
xxx.asn.[country_code] for locker room porn.
xxx.edu.[country_code] for college porn.
xxx.gov.[country_code] for whitehouse porn.
xxx.pub.[country_code] for amatuer porn.
Nominet couldn't get agreement on how to get there from here
Nominet couldn't figure out how to extort most money from the inevitable rush on the new domain space. .uk to existing .co.uk or .org.uk and have some difficulty reaching an agreement on how that would be done fairly, but I highly doubt that is the issue they're facing).
(They could try and figure out some method of costfree assigning
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We still use the mile, and most market stalls still list prices in both kilograms and pounds. Measuring the weight of a person is still done in stone and pounds in the home in many cases. Some builders and estate agents still use feet and inches. So in reality us Brits have to be able to work with either system and be able to convert between them.
10 million are registered. They are used all over the place. Are you sure you've never seen them?
stuff goes here
Anonymous Coward may be overstating things slightly, but there is an element of truth in what they wrote. Any large business in the UK will register both .co.uk and the corresponding .com: they need both versions to prevent domain squatters muddying their name. So for example if you look at major UK supermarkets: tesco.co.uk, waitrose.co.uk, marksandspencer.co.uk all redirect to the corresponding .com address, Asda let you use either at the top level but all subsequent links are .com. Only Sainburys do it the other way round and redirect sainsburys.com to sainsburys.co.uk.
Smaller companies though may not want or be bothered about protecting their name that way so they pick one or the other. Also international companies like Amazon and Google often use the country specific domains to provide a localised service.
I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
Actually the .gb domain does exist for historical reasons.
And .uk should be the TLD for Ukraine, not .ua
http://f.uk/ will do
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is the same country that allows TFA's lawsuit about "defamatory proceedings" for people who criticized it too hard. What could possibly go wrong having these same people registering porn?
I love the idea of presumptively needing permission of government to do things. It makes me feel safe.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
As per ISO 3166, the correct two-character code for that country is GB, not UK. The TLD ought to match.
Unfortunately, changing *.uk to *.gb would be about as easy as the IPv6 switchover...
Oh, Christ. Don't get me started. It should never have been GB in the first place since GB is only a subset of UK. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_British_Isles .
actually xxx.gov.[country_code] could prove to be rather interesting in Italy (Bunga Bunga), France or the States. But I don't even want to contemplate on Germany.
ISO is just plain wrong.
Consider Northern Ireland - a part of the United Kingdom. Neither .gb nor .ie (Republic of Ireland) would apply.
Part of the problem was one of precedence: many holders of domains under .co.uk, .org.uk and several other existing subdomains were happy with the idea of getting a shorter domain - but very unhappy with the thought that they might lose it to a competing domain owner with the same name in a different sub-domain - or even to a trademark holder with no exact equivalent at the moment.
Another part of the problem was Nominet's proposal for "security". In the name of building "trust and confidence in .uk" Nominet had proposed to extend itself from traditional registry options to scanning websites for malware, and using its power to suspend domains to enforce clean-up. Not surprisingly, this was controversial.
Note also that Nominet has said it might come back with some variant of these proposals later, perhaps extending its "security" scheme to all the existing .uk domains.
This sort of thing is elegant, and appeals to engineers who love everything to be neatly organised and categorised in an easy to remember system.
.us domain system worked (third level domain and lower only until 2002).
Problem is, DNS hasn't been about engineering considerations for some time. It's very much a marketing thing. Microsoft and Apple would love to have websites at www.microsoft and www.apple respectively. The ".com" just means "on the internet" which was cool a decade ago and even cooler back in the mid 1990's but that's nothing special any more.
As for being "fuxxored", I think a big problem was the inclusion of non-national domains, and the stupid way the
www prefixes? That's so twentieth-century.
10 million are registered.
There are plenty of registrations for the .us TLD as well, but how many of those do you actually see used?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Slashdot.org, of course has always been ahead of its time:)
You do know that most of the UK companies that you quote are also international companies? That's why they have .com addresses.
Don't most people find their way to a site from a search engine or links off another page? Quite frankly, to me urls are like phone numbers or email addresses - they can be important but once they're in the system I let that take care of them. I can honestly say I do not know any of my friends' phone number or email address or any URLs of note - why would I?
One world, one internet, one stupid bit of identification that gets abstracted away within seconds. Why make the distinction at all?
ISO isn't wrong. Although GB literally stands for "Great Britain" it has historically been used as an abbreviation to represent the UK including whichever bits of Ireland were under Westminster's control at the time, and the myriad islands immediately off the coast. And it is still in current use: for example, Northern Irish cars driving in France have to display a "GB" sticker.
In short, Great Britain is an island; GB is a country code representing the UK. Ahistorical wikifools struggle with this.
...which makes the whole country-TLD system look like a bad idea from the beginning.
bickerdyke
Well, working for a solicitors, you should ask them.
I would think the first answer that would spring to mind is "UK jurisdiction of law applies to the ownership and management of the domain name".
When another firm in the US kicks up a fuss about that solicitor doing something, or arguing over ownership of the name, or arguing about services provided from that name, they will be in their own jurisdiction and your UK solicitors will have to work in a foreign one to allow their business to continue to operate from that name.
Sure, it's a minor thing that may never happen, but isn't that how solicitors make their money?
It hasn't been abandoned see their news release http://www.nominet.org.uk/news/latest/update-directuk The problem was that in the original proposal they intended to give priority to trademark proprietors but this was campaigned against mainly by domainers who stood to loose out. A majority of useful .co.uk domains are held by domain prospectors and the original proposal would have meant that other people would have had a chance at registering a domain by showing some sort of entitlement to it.
Now however nominet are suggesting that they look at changing the proposal to "A revised phased release mechanism based largely on the prior registrations of domains in existing third levels within .uk" effectively making it a simple domain tax where exiting .co.uk & org.uk domain registrants will feel obliged to take the option to get the .uk version of their domain.
The whole idea is is a farce and nothing more than a money making exercise for nominet. They claim that there was broad support for new 'features' such as addres verification. They have however not demonstrated an valid reason as to why they need to start selling domains in the .uk space rather than simply applying these new 'features' to the existing system.
Nobody stands to gain anything from the direct.uk proposal but despite that nominet seems the be determined to try again, what does that tell you ? I would encourage people to send in their complaints to policy@nominet.org.uk
Why keep the www when that's basically redundant information as well?
No real need. I just added it because "microsoft" doesn't look like a domain.
It's messier than that.
"Great Britain" is the main island (containing engliand scotland and wales)
"The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the whole country
"United Kingdom" is a term that currently usually reffers to the above country but there have been other united kingdoms in the past.
In general when forming their country the ISO has preffered to use geographic terms from the country's name over parts of the name that represent how it is currently governed even if those geographic terms don't precisely line up with the countries current borders. Taken in this light the GB and IE country codes make perfect sense.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So in reality us Brits have to be able to work with either system and be able to convert between them.
Not really, you are only working with a small subset of imperial units. I bet that you don't even know how to convert between a Dutch and a French inch.
We don't need to - everyone knows the British inch is best :)
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
There used to be http://del.icio.us/ but it seems they've changed it.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
for the very same reason .com and .org are used to make it possible for business and charities to both have a useful domain name.
You can always just get Cook Island domains.
I find "subzero" confusing in Canadian or British weather. Adds to the wind-chill confusion, but that is less common.
I read somewhere British phone numbers are the most difficult to remember. Maybe it's the punctuation, but I mostly like the U.S. system, except for the newer area code regime.
Oh, and the billion as million-million thing too. Does the BBC still stick with "thousand million" and "million million" exclusively? Can't recall I've heard it recently.
http://microsoft/ does
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Much more funny is this explanation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 by CGPGRey
Nicked from Wikipedia
All seems rather sensible, I thought.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Why not xxx.[country_code] for porn? No need to add an extra level just for that.
I like the idea of a separate porn tld, makes it easy both for those who want to find it, and those who want to avoid it.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
My employer has esesntially that set it. We use a ".com" as a kind of global landing page that will link to the various regions as well as corporate/investor relations type of thing. Then each country has their own page, as well as some special domains for multinational entities that are still nevertheless sub-entities of the corporate whole.
It can sound confusing until you look at it:
Landing page for anyone, anywhere.
Japanese domestic market.
United Kingdom domestic market.
United States domestic market.
German domestic market.
Many, many, many, more domestic markets.
European headquarters (my employer) providing European-wide services (also hosts a lot of the content that appears on the various countries' sites)
Really pretty simple and clear for the most part.
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My employer has esesntially that set it.
Holy hell, what was in my lunch that made me type that?!
I think I probably meant to type: "My employer has essentially the same."
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Eminently sensible. ".com" should have been "us.co." from the start
An added advantage would be automatic prepending of your local country code, and perhaps even your choice of second-level, if omitted -- so "http://ge/" would map to us.co.ge for USA users and uk.co.ge for users in Llandudno.
Plenty of fun to be had with this system too, http://co.co.chanel/ and http://be.me.up.scotty/ for starters.
At one time, IE would change a URL of "freecell" to "freecell.com", then use that to bring up the solitaire game.
I don't think anybody thinks in terms of billion = million million over here these days (even the Treasury... though if you ask them, the poor sod who answers the phone might have to go and check... just to be sure...)
Shouldn't xxx.asn be for Asian porn? It deserves its own category, no matter the country of origin.
which is totally what she said
Why keep the www when that's basically redundant information as well?
It's a legacy. www wasnt' the first service on the Internet, and ultimately, all Internet service requests have to reference a host. Usually we don't use raw IP addresses, so a fully-qualified domain hostname would be needed. It was common to alias (or primarily) name the www server with hostname "www", giving a FQDN of www.foobar.com. As distinguised from its gopher server in a different box (gopher.foobar.com) or the mail servers (mail.foobar.com and smtp.foobar.com).
However, as www grew, the assumption that the www server's hostname was going to be "www" became a safe bet, so if a client couldn't find a "foobar.com", it would try "www.foobar.com". For that matter, if it couldn't find "foobar", it would often look for "foobar.com" then "www.foobar.com".
In addition to adding educated guesswork to clients, DNS also participated in the conspiracy. A lot of places did clustering on the www service, so the actual physical hostname was no longer relevant.
So, in short, the full www.foobar.com remains, but we don't usually have to go to that much trouble anymore.
We've given up, and billion means thousand million in British English now.
Even more embarrassing, we now called muffins "English Muffins", because everyone thinks muffins are those fluffy things baked in tins that Starbucks sell.
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At one time there were three countries without much geography in their common names:
United Kingdom (of...)
United States (of...)
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (no geography at all).
Then there's the (Roman) Empire and the (Roman) Catholic Church. Anglicans talk about a "catholic" church, meaning "universal," which is confusing.
And it persists. My kid's teacher's email address is @brrsd.k12.nj.us.
Are you sure that was part of thee DNS? Usenet used that kind of hierarchy: humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc, alt.binaries.nice, alt.tv, etc. Also, you see DNS names reversed like uk.co.bbc in algorithms. Makes a much more readable sorted list.
I believe you mean JANet and the NRS, which used names along the lines of UK.AC.
Too bad they didn't go the other way too: us.konicaminolta.com, uk.konicaminolta.com, etc. Were I registering domains for a big company selling to consumers, I'd register anything they might reasonably guess. (Plus use geolocation to guess for them.)
OTOH, people use Google (etc.) so much that the actual domain names almost don't matter--just click on what Google found. (I still can't remember our public library's convoluted domain name even though I go to the site a couple times a week.)
.co is short for COmpany or COmmercial depending on your viewpoint. The purpose of DNS is to organise things neatly. So, in the correct spirit of this the UK name space has a nice organised set of sub-domains (see above or below for someone posting the Wikipedia list of them). Because people are stupid/lazy they don't want to learn to understand why this is good, and someone proposed flattening the layout for DNS at-large (the proposed .apple .microsoft etc.) and Nominet thought maybe they should do the same with their bit of it.
I work in a solicitors in the UK. Our website address is .com, as is the address from a huge majority of solicitors who I have to look up daily in order to write to them.
What was the point of you writing this? You must know it's clearly wrong. "dot co dot you kay" is as well-knows as "dot com" in the UK. Of the 10 "local results" that come up when I type "solicitors" into Google, nine have a .co.uk domain for their website.
And how about: argos.co.uk, three.co.uk, orange.co.uk, bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, mtv.co.uk, ...
They don't seem as popular as .de in Germany (15M domains), but they're a lot more popular than .us (only 1M domains in a much bigger country).
Not really. Tesco's Czech operation uses .cz http://www.itesco.cz/cs/, their Hungarian one .hu: http://tesco.hu/
I suspect if I accessed tesco.com from a Hungarian IP I'd be redirected.
10 million are registered.
There are plenty of registrations for the .us TLD as well, but how many of those do you actually see used?
There are only 1.7 million .US domains compared to 10 million .UK domains, and the UK is smaller.
Step 6: After the last .uk domain expired, remove the .uk TLD.
That shouldn't ever happen. It would break huge numbers of old links, and disrupt other uses of domains (unique identifiers etc).
Accepting it won't ever happen, there's little point every trying. The UK code is reserved by ISO (will never be allocated), due to the potential for confusion.
"
Perhaps the day will come when we all have to put "dot earth" at the end of our domain names.
And of course eventually "dot earth dot sol" after that.
"
Impractical until we get FTL communication - who wants to wait 9 years (at least) for a webpage to load (eg from Alpha Centauri)
But it hasn't been a "Kingdom" since 1953 or so
> Not really, you are only working with a small subset of imperial units.
Newsflash: NOBODY, not even AMERICANS, uses the "full set" of imperial units in daily life. The main POINT Of imperial units, and why they persist, is because for some specific problem domains, they happen to work with nicer whole units that are more convenient for that purpose. Americans happily buy Diet Mountain Dew in 12oz cans and 2-liter bottles.
> Where are you living ?
Obviously in a place with a lot of pubs.
And in those pubs you can "use" your "privates"... whatever that might mean... http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/private#Synonyms_2
Anyway, smoking is not allowed in those pubs. Just so you know you CAN grow hair on the palms of your hand without damaging your lungs.
> pub.[country_code] for private usage
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
non-free porn ?
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
Cook Islands .ck TLD should in theory let you have web addresses like "big.co.ck" or "oh.fu.ck". However they don't appear to work.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It is a holdover from the JANET naming system which was in reverse order from DNS and had a strict hierarchy of sub domains. email gateways between JANET and DNS-based internet would reverse the address components as necessary. The old naming hierarchy was maintained with the transition of the UK to DNS to maintain consistency through the transition.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I prefer the 2nd level domain system on a national level it is easier for dispute resolution.
All domains should have something like this: com.[country_code] for registered national business org.[country_code] for registered national organisation asn.[country_code] for registered national association edu.[country_code] for registered national education gov.[country_code] for official government usage pub.[country_code] for private usage xxx.com.[country_code] for registered national porn.
Everything else should be scrapped. Unfortunately the whole DNS is fuxxored from the start by a lack of foresight and unfortunately it's too late to fix it. The US may have invented it but they invented a piece of crap which only benefits lawyers.
my 2c.
Or turn it around. Have the country's initials precede the .com/.org/.gov/.xxx and so on. Like have kremlin.ru.gov, berkeley.us.edu, comcast.us.net, slashdot.us.org or kaspersky.ru.com. If a company is a multinational company that has huge presences in countries outside its home, such as IBM, Intel, Google, et al, then they can have the option of either doing what they're doing now to represent their multinational aspect e.g. ibm.com, intel.com, google.com, or they could have localized pages for every country that they want to represnet. So instead of doing something like mn.google.com, they would do google.mn.com to represent their Mongolian page. Or things like it.
ICANN can manage the few TLDs that are there - .com, .org, .net, .xxx, while the next level, which would be at national levels, each country can decide how they want to do it. Free societies like in the West can decide to let public autonomous organizations run it, while totalitarian countries, like .ch, .nk, .ir, .sa, .pk, can have their secret police run them. Everyone will be happy.
You forgot .xxx.com for profit/professional porn. That would complete it.
Ireland is .ie - it could have been .ei, as in Eire, the country's former native name. For Scotland, give them .sc, give Seychelles (who has .sc) se, and give Sweden (who as .se) .sw. Northern Ireland could get .ul for Ulster, unless Ireland objects, since parts of the region fall within the Irish Republic.
Domain: sh.it
Status: UNASSIGNABLE