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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 "These .EU domain names will then be withdrawn and will become inoperable," states the guidance issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which confirms warnings issued this year by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.
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 "These .EU domain names will then be withdrawn and will become inoperable," states the guidance issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which confirms warnings issued this year by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.
You can be free or have your domain name but also enslaved to faceless unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
Gosh, how to decide!
You Remainers are so silly. Is this really your best argument for overturning the referendum?
Seems like a good opportunity for someone in the EU to start a business that will hold these domains for British companies and forward them to the appropriate .uk or .com for the people who don’t update to the new domains.
As far as issues surrounding Brexit go, this is pretty inconsequential.
a few days before the UK has to decide if they stay or leave. The UK is quite likely to stay in EU (rather than face a hard brexit).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I hope the uneducated racist Brexiteers get used to losing because since the Russian government tricked you idiots into citing against your interest you have pretty much only corrected the drain occasionally distracting the world from Trump's obvious treason.
You could void every single .eu domain in the world and I wouldn't even notice. The majority are probably owned by domain-squatters and front-running registrars.
It would seem like that move would be an unlawful taking of property. The domain owners were part of the EU when the sites were registered, and the only reason to take their domains away is spite.
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
The ccTLDs are to be used for the benefit of the unit they were issued before --- But having 340,000 legit domains' being purged is a major dereliction of Registries' obligation to utilize policies and procedures that provide for a stable internet registry.
Probably the best outcome would be to revoke the EU ccTLD from its current registry/administrator, and re-assign the management of the TLD who will preserve all registrations and administer the registry in a manner that will not unnecessarily destabilize the internet DNS namespace.
There have been some grim reports about what could happen with Brexit, but this one takes it. Call it off. Full stop.
Judging from all the "If you DARE to leave the EU, the apocalypse will happen!" scare tactics that EU authoritarians are throwing out left-and-right, one has to wonder how the UK ever survived at all in the hundreds of years prior to joining the EU.
Remind me again, please. Prior to 1973, were Brits living in shacks and starving, without medicine, currency, or any technology? Because listening to these Chicken Littles, you would certainly suspect so.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe the UK could negotiate with Trump to replace the .eu addresses with an equally prestigious domain.
Like .biz
Last I checked, you don't really have to live somewhere to own something. It would be a petty move to push that 'logic' now. Well, not as petty as Brexit itself, but almost as pointless and self-destructive for the sake of making a statement that means almost nothing.
There's something really odd about the human psychology - where the common welfare throughout history has always been cheaper to maintain than paying for the consequences of it breaking down - but folks seem to viscerally dislike any status improvement of their neighbors.
England specifically is rife with examples of this - the very fall of their empire is basically the story of a folks with a romantic love of Malthusian-like economic ideas inflicting abject cruelty in the name of the nobility of self-gain, and literally losing nation after nation after nation.
Ryan Fenton
These Brixiteers really are ridiculous people.
The UK in particular has spent the last 20 years sending literally their shittiest asshole politicians who were either too incompetent or corrupt for meaningful work to the EU for representation.
They have, at every single turn, sought to disrupt the EU for doing much of anything.
They spent 20 years doing this shit.
Now, after all this time of trying to fuck everything up, they bitch that things are fucked up in the EU. Of course they are you idiots! You spent the least 20 years doing your best to fuck it up.
Then, the assholes vote to leave. On top of that, they cry like little bitches that the EU is not bending over backwards and giving them whatever they want.
The UK seems to believe they are still a global power. News flash. Your not.
Nearly all your exports are to the EU, as are much of your imports. You are completely fucked and you deserve to be fucked.
I hope it's a no deal and we get to watch you tear yourselves apart. But hey... don't worry, I am sure that "extremely fast deal with America" will be forthcoming.
Hey.. remember how you said you would spend all that EU money on health care, but actually you didnt spend any of it on health care? Because you are lying fucks who only want to break shit.
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.
Would California be better off leaving the USA? Doubtful. Would Quebec be better off leaving Canada? Almost certainly not. Is the UK going to be better off without the EU. My money is on no.
Brexit was voted for primarily by old folks pining for the days when the British Empire was a significant player in the world. Those days are long gone and are not coming back. Sorry.
You were an important player on an important team. Soon you will be just another country of 65 million. Granted, you are twice the size of Canada, so I'm sure you will have relevance in the world commensurate with that going forward.
Enjoy.
Like everyone else is doing...
Just finished making a big deal about hiding the real names and information of site owners from Whois searches. So unless the EU is going to violate its own rules, how will they even know who owns what?
Have gnu, will travel.
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
Who honestly would care if a .EU domain was lost?
In fact you could then derive some benefit by being able to write off the expense of the domain as a loss.
That's performing a lot better than the value of having a domain that ends with .eu, which not one person in the history of the internet has typed on purpose.
Find a single company who has a .EU domain not backed by other more common domains like .com. Just one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Either the person who made the summary is trolling, or he has no clue about the EU. It's far more likely that a political group from Italy or France will try to get the domain "leave.eu".
Anyway, nationalism is on the rise everywhere in Europe, even in Germany, and unless something completely unexpected happens, the end of the EU is now just a matter of time.
As I previously said, the British should revoke anything they like (or no longer like) in *.io.
Round three of UK vs Continental Europe.
First it was Napolean, then the Nazis. Now it's Merkel and the Eurocrats. Good luck, Britain. It may be tougher this time, as a socialist country full of foreign welfare clingers.
>> a few days before the UK has to decide if they stay or leave.
hmm. no.
This was decided 2 years ago.
Too late, guys.
there is very little relevant content hosted on ".eu" domains. Actually, ".eu" domains seem to have been so cheap to obtain that they have become used largely for weird search-engine-optimization pseudo web-presences.
.eu domains registered from UK will be missed by anyone.
I doubt any of the many
Is allegedy registered to a UK company. Whois.net ain’t sayin, though.
The goal is that the individual countries shall become the equivalent of US states. So, for instance, any citizen of the US can move wherever he wants to. Anyone can go live in California any time they choose. Anyone can invest anyplace they want and sell their goods anywhere, as long as they meet Federal standards.
In the same way, the EU target is that anyone in the EU should be able to move to Germany or the UK any time they choose. Same with investment. Same with sales of goods, which of course requires one set of standards, which in turn requires a court to enforce the rules.
The model the EU has chosen, in implementing this, is based on the Continental European models. Naturally enough, since that is who the founders were. So we find a mixture of the French and Prussian approaches to government and democracy. You have a technocratic civil service, with entry by competitive examination, government mainly by appointed officials, extensive powers for the executive to rule by decree. As with the Zollverein of the 19c, this has produced a large internal market with a tariff wall, a system whose essential goal is to make enough concessions to big agriculture and big business to keep both on board, and has also resulted in extensive regulation with the aim of managing tradeoffs among large corporate or national interests.
The classic example of this is the CAP, whose sole aim is to protect the EU (originally French) farm industry, in exchange for tariff barriers for other imported goods and services.
The UK electorate, when invited by its leaders to join the EU, was assured that this was purely a trading arrangement of sovereign countries, and that all talk of a federal European state was scare mongering. For many decades the EU and the UK told these two different stories about the enterprise. Finally however there came earthquakes which laid bare the contradiction. One was the financial crash and the crisis over Greek debt. This is continuing with the much bigger problem of Italian debt. The other was the migration crisis.
What this showed was a combination of dysfunctionality and unaccountability. If you take the second first, it turned out that Greece was powerless. There was no democratic influence on policy. There was also no democratic influence on the subsequent money printing by the EU central bank. Because those in charge were not elected on a European basis.
Americans will find this hard to visualize. You have to imagine America without any Presidential elections, without a Senate, and with a Congress which cannot initiate legislation and which commutes between Washington and some little city in California every few weeks. An arrangement which is widely ridiculed, but which it is powerless to change. Meanwhile, government is done by a civil service whose head is appointed by agreement of the Governors of the States, and this body has extensive rights to pass decrees which the States are then obliged to implement in state law.
So, there's a lack of accountability, but more than that, you can see that half the institutions which make Federal Government work in the US are missing. And that is why the migrant crisis was such an eye opener: there were no internal borders, but there was also no border force.
In the buildup to the UK Referendum all this became increasingly apparent and on TV every night (and all day, since the BBC has a 24 hour news channel). At the same time, there was the increasing consensus in Brussels, Paris and Germany that the answer to the financial and immigration issues was more Europe.
Much of the UK outside London had also over the years come to understand what the 'free movement of people', one of the famous Four Freedoms of the EU, really meant. It meant the freedom for everyone in a low wage