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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);
The Australian government provided a list. Thanks, Steve.
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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I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
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 .
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.
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
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
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.
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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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.