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Will A No-Deal Brexit Void 340,000 British-Owned .EU Domains? (theguardian.com)

The Guardian reports on what may happen next to British businesses and individuals who own .EU domains: There are about 340,000 registered British holders of these web addresses, and the government has urged them to make contingency plans as their web addresses will disappear if the UK does not agree on a deal with Brussels. The domains were introduced in 2006 as a rival to the likes of .com and .org but are available only to individuals or businesses based in the EU or the European Economic Area (EEA)...

Updated government guidance confirms that if the UK leaves without a deal at the end of March then domain owners based in the UK will have two months leeway to move their principal location to somewhere within the EU or EEA. "These .EU domain names will then be withdrawn and will become inoperable," states the guidance issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which confirms warnings issued this year by the EU's domain registrar. "This means you may not be able to access your .EU websites or email from 30 May 2019."

After a year, all the British-registered .EU domains will be made available for purchase by individuals and companies who continue to reside in the EU. This raises the possibility that on the anniversary of a no-deal Brexit, one lucky German or Spaniard could be able to mark the occasion by taking over the Leave.EU domain and using it for their own purposes.

12 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If so, small price to pay for freedom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    We would love to leave. Unfortunatly the corrupt unelected EU beaurocrats REALLY don't want us too, and our corrupt dumbass politicians are complicit.

  2. Re:Seizure of Property by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Like:

    "This guy *used* to work as a nurse but doesn't any more, so taking away his nurse card is just spite?"

    1) The domains aren't your property.
    2) The domains have conditions attached to their ownership, including that you have to be in the EU.
    3) If you were a true EU entity (not just someone who only trades in the UK), you would be unaffected because you'd still have a European base somewhere. If not, you should have bought the .uk and not the .eu.
    4) All you need do to maintain registration is have an EU address. So there will be a bunch of places offering proxy registration, I imagine, subject to the usual "until someone finds out" that all such proxy registrations have.

    It's like saying that the US should be able to pull out of NATO but still say they are a NATO member and still maintain a US section on the NATO website.

    (P.S. I'm English. I can't help but agreeing with them in this regard, as if it was the other way around, e.g. Germany leaving, we'd be saying EXACTLY the same.)

    (P.P.S. I'm still hopeful that people realise Brexit was a ridiculously stupid idea that should never have been posited, much less put to a public vote. If we hadn't been given the opportunity to vote, basically nobody would have given a shit and life would have carried on with absolutely minimal protest. It's like asking people if they "want" to give millions in aid to African states. If you ask, the answer will definitely be no. You don't do things like that because they are popular, you do things like that because they make sense. It's like a state "voting itself" out of the US... you'd have to have a REALLY, REALLY good reason to do that, not just "we asked people and they said they wanted it". And you then wouldn't be eligible to register a .us domain in that state... see the pattern?)

  3. Re:I wouldn't worry much by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even the official Vote Leave campaign wasn't dumb enough to try to leave the way Teresa May has. Their leaflet said that they would negotiate the withdrawal before triggering Article 50.

    May's red lines fucked the UK. The EU's single market is nearly over 6x larger than the UK market, so clearly they were never going to do anything to damage it just for the sake of Britain. Her only plan seems to have been to negotiate a deal that she can claim delivers some perverse form of brexit, and then run down the clock until everyone panics and accepts it.

    Fortunately Parliament is fighting hard to stop her, but all the while it's damaging the UK. Even if it cancels right now, a lot of harm has already been done.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Worse by JRiddell · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No deal Brexit means effectively shutting off the supply lines from continental Europe to Great Britian. It'll mean food shortages, medicine shortage, looting, riots and deaths. It will mean the return of terrorist warfare in Ireland. Lots of websites breaking will be a pain but not the biggest of problems.

    Charlie Stross writes well
    http://www.antipope.org/charli...

    That the UK government has allowed us to get this close to it shows that they are not competent but also that game theory on a game of chicken is accurate when it says it can end up with the worst case scenario.

  5. Re:More scare tactics by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Reminds me of all the outrage over how the EU is steering the Article 50 process. We fucking wrote it, we decided that would be how it works.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  6. Re:I wouldn't worry much by peragrin · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The official Leave campaign was stupid, and believed the EU would cave 100% and give the UK everything including a fake membership in the EU but still let the UK leave.

    That is like a divorce attorny saying you get to keep the house, the kids, the cars, the vacation homes, and 100% of his income for all eternity and he has only random visitation rights.

    Life doesn't work that way.

    The whole leave Campaign was stupid Britian is going to be a shell of it's former self inside of 30 years. I say britian, as Scotland and Northern Ireland are gone within 20 years.

    Both of them know where the future lies and it isn't with backward thinking close minded idiots that voted to leave the EU.

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
  7. Better by SuperKendall · · Score: 2, Insightful

    None of that will happen, what will happen is that the UK being free of stupid EU rules and regulations will become a vast economic powerhouse where people go for things the EU will not allow... a giant grey market wonderland of prosperity.

    Stick that in your pipe of gloom and smoke it.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Better by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The bananas thing is penalty even more stupid thank you might realise. There is, like all the best lies a small grain of truth in it. There were rules, but they were OUR rules that we persuaded the EU to adopt.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  8. Re:I wouldn't worry much by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Hard brexit" just means "no deal brexit" which is what the UK citizenry voted for in the referendum.

    No they didn't. They were told they could eat their cake and have it - get the benefits of membership without the costs and the obligations.

    I lost count of how many times I heard "The Germans will still want to sell their cars, the French will still want to sell their wine" and shit like that.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  9. Re:I wouldn't worry much by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For all that I know, phoning Brussels a few minutes before midnight last day with an "Oh, it all was a joke!" won't serve any purpose either.

    You don't know much, then. It's a matter of record that Article 50 may be revoked unilaterally.

    https://www.google.com/search?...

    Isn't there a Trump rally you could be at?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  10. Re:If so, small price to pay for freedom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Indeed, I think Scotland and Northern Ireland should regain their freedom from the faceless bureaucrats in London so they can continue to enjoy all the benefits of being in the EU.

    I have no problem letting England and Wales languish alone.

    dom

  11. Re:I wouldn't worry much by Aighearach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The idiots simply asserted that they could negotiate some sort of sweatheart deal with the EU, when actually the EU needs to withhold any sort of special privileges at all, or else they'd see a whole raft of countries also wanting half-way-out.

    That was never something Brussels would agree to. And yet, it is what was presented to the British people to vote on. Absurd.

    This is the value of a written Constitution that is difficult to change; you don't have some 51% vote that changes the very legal basic of the country.

    "Barnier's Staircase" was the obvious reality even before the Brexit vote; these are well-established diplomatic concepts in the EU already when dealing with potential new members.

    It is all a giant sack of lies and false promises, and it always was. If you don't want a "hard" exit, then you can't reasonably exit; a soft exit has to be on the EU's terms, because they have to protect themselves from a mass-exit. The EU has to offer "soft" exit deals that protect themselves at the expense of the country leaving, otherwise they have to hold their ground and say, "Don't leave unless you mean it."

    Here in the US, a State would have to win a war with the rest of the country to leave. In most cases, unless they were given an option historically. Hawaii and Texas, for example, entered on special terms. But anybody else, no, they can't just vote locally to leave, because it affects everybody in the country. Agreeing to not have totally open borders between different political areas is a really big step, it is like a national marriage; you're not supposed to divorce on a whim, and you have to expect it will be painful and expensive for everybody.