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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 "These .EU domain names will then be withdrawn and will become inoperable," states the guidance issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which confirms warnings issued this year by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 "These .EU domain names will then be withdrawn and will become inoperable," states the guidance issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which confirms warnings issued this year by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.
TFS and TFA do not present this as the best argument for overturning the referendum. It's presented as a consequence and a notice.
Also, this is one in a long list of consequences of Leave.
You are being deliberately deceptive and divisive.
Please Leave.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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. .uk and not the .eu.
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
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?)
And in fact the headline is wrong. This will happen even if we leave with a deal, as negotiating continued use of the .eu TLD is unlikely to be a high priority.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What "scare tactics" are you referring to? Be specific. The EU even refrained from participation in the referendum campaign so that it does not exert undue influence, and it has been as cooperative as possible with the British negotiators since then. All the sound and the fury is coming from London, and there is a good reason for that - the referendum was never a serious leave Brexit thing, the idiot Cameron was just planning to use it as a scare tactic against the EU.
Well, it kinda backfired, but how is this a fault of the EU?
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
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.
You should try trading the rules of the domain registry. Rules that the UK voted for. The TL;DR is that you do indeed have to be in the EU to own one.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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
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
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."
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."
The EU wasn't going to negotiate at all until Article 50 was triggered.
From a US viewpoint, it sounds like the Leave campaign expected to be able to retain all the benefits of being in the EU, while only giving up the parts of membership that they didn't like. And they expected the EU to negotiate on their terms, and give them everything they wanted. And then after the referendum, they found out that's not how the real world works.
I've often felt that the Leave campaign never had any intention of succeeding. Their goals seemed so unrealistic that I assumed their intention was just to create conflict in politics. When they did win the vote, no one really knew how to proceed from there, so they mostly just choose a path of maximum conflict to avoid having to make the hard decisions.
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
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.
The best argument for aborting this madness is democracy.
The first referendum was flawed. It betrayed the recent Scottish referendum which was won on the promise of continued EU membership for a start. The campaigns were awful, the amount of misinformation and cheating was unprecedented, even before looking at the foreign interference.
What has been done since then does not resemble any of the promises or proposals that were made. In fact it is the exact opposite of many of them.
And now it's all deadlocked anyway. The best, the only democratic way to resolve this is another referendum. Present concrete options that will result in well defined, clearly spelt out actions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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