Britain Gets National .uk Web Address

hypnosec (2231454) writes 'Starting today businesses and individuals in the UK will be able to register a new national web address (".uk") and drop their existing ".co.uk" or ".com" suffix in favour of a shorter and snappier domain name. The entire process along with the transition is being overseen by private yet not-for-profit organisation Nominet, which has already started notifying existing customers with a ".co.uk" domain of their chance to adopt a ".uk" domain. Nominet will reserve all ".uk" domain names, which already have a ".co.uk" counterparts, for the next five years offering registrants the chance to adopt the new domain and to keep cyber squatters at bay.'

Comments

In other words

[rujasu]

Everyone with a .co.uk domain name is now basically obligated to register (and pay for) another domain name within the next five years to avoid confusion.

Re:In other words

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Yeah, looks like a lot of registrars are price gouging - according to Nominet, the wholesale price is the same. And definitely don't ever use 123Reg because they'll even charge you to switch. Fuckers!

The only registrar I've found thus-far with the same price for .co.uk and .uk is Mythic Beasts although they're a bit pricey unless you're registering for 10 years.

Gandi.net don't appear to have .uk pricing yet unless I'm missing something!

Moneygrabbing Nominet

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Nominet member I voted against this (twice now, they were defeated the first time, then ignored everyone). Perhaps someone from Nominet can tell me why somedomain.uk is pre-allocated to whoever has somedomain.co.uk rather than the owner of somedomain.org.uk.

Re:Moneygrabbing Nominet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I completely agree.

In my case, the .co.uk address is a cyber squatter. Why should he get priority over a genuine domain?

Re:Moneygrabbing Nominet

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a UK person, but I believe that they're complaining about the fact that, for instance, the person who registered london.co.uk (currently a domain parking page) gets preference for the new london.uk domain over the person who registered london.org.uk (apparently "The London Organization", which appears to be a Visitors/Business organization to promote the city of London.) Or why the (again, domain parking) owner of oxford.co.uk gets preference for obtaining oxford.uk as opposed to the University of Oxford, which has oxford.ac.uk registered.

Re:What about Ukraine?

[ledow]

However, technically, the UK's identifier for everything else is actually "gb", hence we should have the ".gb" instead of ".uk".

But, first-come, first-served which is pretty much the mantra of anything to do with grabbing domain names despite the complete irrelevance of having a "particular" domain to modern computing.

Re:What about Ukraine?

[pablo.cl]

There should be nor arguing about CCTLDs. All CCTLDs, (except for .uk, which is an oddity) are in ISO 3166-1. The standard may be right or wrong, accurate or vague, fair or unfair, but it's a standard.

.gb would be standard.

Re:What about Ukraine?

[91degrees]

The official ISO 3166-1 2 letter code for the UK is GB though - Short for "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".

"United" and "kingdom" aren't usually considered part of a country's name according to the ISO. Although it does seem a little odd that no exception was made in this case, since the United Staes of America is US.

This is all wrong

[Grishnakh]

What we should be doing is eliminating top-level names like .com, .org, .net, and especially .mil, because these are all American-biased. Instead, every country should get its own two-letter domain (.uk, .us, etc.), and inside each of those there should be .co, .org, .mil, .gov, etc. So Twinings Tea from London would have the site "twinings.co.uk", and that's it. Apple Computer would be "apple.co.us". Multinational corporations would get sites in the country where the corporate HQ is located. No multiple domains for the same company; companies only need a commercial address, not a .net or a .org since they aren't non-commercial entities. The Apache Foundation would get "apache.org.us", the US Navy would get "navy.mil.us", the Royal (British) Navy would get "navy.mil.uk", etc.

What they've done now is just a total mess.

Re:This is all wrong

[Kjella]

So Twinings Tea from London would have the site "twinings.co.uk", and that's it.

And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on? If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do), the country of origin is only marginally interesting. It makes guessing the correct domain harder without the use of Google, not easier.

No multiple domains for the same company

Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.

companies only need a commercial address, not a .net or a .org since they aren't non-commercial entities.

The world and their dog already has a dotcom no matter what, you're trying to clean a pool that has more piss than water in it.

Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact and move the whole .com to become root domains at reasonable prices and that's that. Google is just "google", Twinings Tea is just "twinings" and let Apple the computer company and Apple the music company and Apple the produce company fight over who's "apple", absolutely nobody wants their domain name to be some kind of unique categorization down a tree, it's "google" not "google.searchengine". Reserve the two-letter domains as special cases for nations and let the free market settle the rest. Practically there's no problem, are you Tesla building cars? Get teslamotors.com and the whole thing is solved with 99% less drama.

Re:What about Ukraine?

[fellip_nectar]

The UK was initially assigned .gb and it's still reserved for us. But we got to use .uk too, as it made the transition from JANET NRS to DNS easier for our pre-existing academic network.

Re:Another chance...

[dogsbreath]

popeye.uk.uk.uk.uk.uk.uk