Shorter '.uk' Domain Name Put On Ice 110
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."
Re:Should be .gb not .uk (Score:2, Informative)
And .uk should be the TLD for Ukraine, not .ua
Re:Should be .gb not .uk (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] .
Problems with .uk (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Should be .gb not .uk (Score:3, Informative)
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.