Shorter '.uk' Domain Name Put On Ice

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."

Translation

[mwvdlee]

Nominet couldn't get agreement on how to get there from here

Nominet couldn't figure out how to extort most money from the inevitable rush on the new domain space.
(They could try and figure out some method of costfree assigning .uk to existing .co.uk or .org.uk and have some difficulty reaching an agreement on how that would be done fairly, but I highly doubt that is the issue they're facing).

Re:Should be .gb not .uk

[ChunderDownunder]

ISO is just plain wrong.

Consider Northern Ireland - a part of the United Kingdom. Neither .gb nor .ie (Republic of Ireland) would apply.

Does anyone even care?

[LoztInSpace]

Don't most people find their way to a site from a search engine or links off another page? Quite frankly, to me urls are like phone numbers or email addresses - they can be important but once they're in the system I let that take care of them. I can honestly say I do not know any of my friends' phone number or email address or any URLs of note - why would I?
One world, one internet, one stupid bit of identification that gets abstracted away within seconds. Why make the distinction at all?

Re:Don't change it...

[RabidReindeer]

Why keep the www when that's basically redundant information as well?

It's a legacy. www wasnt' the first service on the Internet, and ultimately, all Internet service requests have to reference a host. Usually we don't use raw IP addresses, so a fully-qualified domain hostname would be needed. It was common to alias (or primarily) name the www server with hostname "www", giving a FQDN of www.foobar.com. As distinguised from its gopher server in a different box (gopher.foobar.com) or the mail servers (mail.foobar.com and smtp.foobar.com).

However, as www grew, the assumption that the www server's hostname was going to be "www" became a safe bet, so if a client couldn't find a "foobar.com", it would try "www.foobar.com". For that matter, if it couldn't find "foobar", it would often look for "foobar.com" then "www.foobar.com".

In addition to adding educated guesswork to clients, DNS also participated in the conspiracy. A lot of places did clustering on the www service, so the actual physical hostname was no longer relevant.

So, in short, the full www.foobar.com remains, but we don't usually have to go to that much trouble anymore.