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."
Well, shit... (Score:5, Funny)
There will not be a motherf.uk
Shorter ... (Score:2)
http://f.uk/ [f.uk] will do
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http://sh.it [sh.it] is available.
Well, WHOIS says... (Score:2)
Domain: sh.it
Status: UNASSIGNABLE
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F.and S (Score:5, Funny)
Re:F.and S (Score:5, Funny)
I am totally registering goats.uk if they do this.
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This is the same country that allows TFA's lawsuit about "defamatory proceedings" for people who criticized it too hard. What could possibly go wrong having these same people registering porn?
I love the idea of presumptively needing permission of government to do things. It makes me feel safe.
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Obviously in a place with a lot of pubs.
And in those pubs you can "use" your "privates"... whatever that might mean... http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/private#Synonyms_2
Anyway, smoking is not allowed in those pubs. Just so you know you CAN grow hair on the palms of your hand without damaging your lungs.
> pub.[country_code] for private usage
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What on earth is national porn? (outside of .jp, that is)
Re:Don't change it... (Score:4, Funny)
That is great idea but I would also want:
xxx.org.[country_code] for non-profit porn.
xxx.asn.[country_code] for locker room porn.
xxx.edu.[country_code] for college porn.
xxx.gov.[country_code] for whitehouse porn.
xxx.pub.[country_code] for amatuer porn.
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Shouldn't xxx.asn be for Asian porn? It deserves its own category, no matter the country of origin.
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Problem is, DNS hasn't been about engineering considerations for some time. It's very much a marketing thing. Microsoft and Apple would love to have websites at www.microsoft and www.apple respectively. The ".com" just means "on the internet" which was cool a decade ago and even cooler back in the mid 1990's but that's nothing special any more.
As for being "fux
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www prefixes? That's so twentieth-century.
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Why keep the www when that's basically redundant information as well?
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http://microsoft/ [microsoft] does
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At one time, IE would change a URL of "freecell" to "freecell.com", then use that to bring up the solitaire game.
Re:Don't change it... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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And it persists. My kid's teacher's email address is @brrsd.k12.nj.us.
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Why not xxx.[country_code] for porn? No need to add an extra level just for that.
I like the idea of a separate porn tld, makes it easy both for those who want to find it, and those who want to avoid it.
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non-free porn ?
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Absolutely. On the Radio yesterday they were pointing out a scam where a company charges 30UKP for "helping" you to fill out a UK passport application form. Many people thought they were on the official government passport site, because it was the first thing in the Google results. One of the points of advice on the program was to look at the URL for .gov.uk rather than .co.uk
With the number of scammers on the internet, one thing it's not sensible to lose is identification of official government sites right
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I prefer the 2nd level domain system on a national level it is easier for dispute resolution.
All domains should have something like this: com.[country_code] for registered national business org.[country_code] for registered national organisation asn.[country_code] for registered national association edu.[country_code] for registered national education gov.[country_code] for official government usage pub.[country_code] for private usage xxx.com.[country_code] for registered national porn.
Everything else should be scrapped. Unfortunately the whole DNS is fuxxored from the start by a lack of foresight and unfortunately it's too late to fix it. The US may have invented it but they invented a piece of crap which only benefits lawyers.
my 2c.
Or turn it around. Have the country's initials precede the .com/.org/.gov/.xxx and so on. Like have kremlin.ru.gov, berkeley.us.edu, comcast.us.net, slashdot.us.org or kaspersky.ru.com. If a company is a multinational company that has huge presences in countries outside its home, such as IBM, Intel, Google, et al, then they can have the option of either doing what they're doing now to represent their multinational aspect e.g. ibm.com, intel.com, google.com, or they could have localized pages for every
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10 million are registered. They are used all over the place. Are you sure you've never seen them?
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You do know that most of the UK companies that you quote are also international companies? That's why they have .com addresses.
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...which makes the whole country-TLD system look like a bad idea from the beginning.
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Not really. Tesco's Czech operation uses .cz http://www.itesco.cz/cs/ [itesco.cz], their Hungarian one .hu: http://tesco.hu/ [tesco.hu]
I suspect if I accessed tesco.com from a Hungarian IP I'd be redirected.
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10 million are registered.
There are plenty of registrations for the .us TLD as well, but how many of those do you actually see used?
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10 million are registered.
There are plenty of registrations for the .us TLD as well, but how many of those do you actually see used?
There are only 1.7 million .US domains compared to 10 million .UK domains, and the UK is smaller.
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I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
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I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
My employer has esesntially that set it. We use a ".com" as a kind of global landing page that will link to the various regions as well as corporate/investor relations type of thing. Then each country has their own page, as well as some special domains for multinational entities that are still nevertheless sub-entities of the corporate whole.
It can sound confusing until you look at it:
Landing page for anyone, anywhere. [konicaminolta.com]
Japanese domestic market. [konicaminolta.jp]
United Kingdom domestic market. [konicaminolta.co.uk]
United States domestic ma [konicaminolta.us]
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My employer has esesntially that set it.
Holy hell, what was in my lunch that made me type that?!
I think I probably meant to type: "My employer has essentially the same."
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Too bad they didn't go the other way too: us.konicaminolta.com, uk.konicaminolta.com, etc. Were I registering domains for a big company selling to consumers, I'd register anything they might reasonably guess. (Plus use geolocation to guess for them.)
OTOH, people use Google (etc.) so much that the actual domain names almost don't matter--just click on what Google found. (I still can't remember our public library's convoluted domain name even though I go to the site a couple times a week.)
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Well, working for a solicitors, you should ask them.
I would think the first answer that would spring to mind is "UK jurisdiction of law applies to the ownership and management of the domain name".
When another firm in the US kicks up a fuss about that solicitor doing something, or arguing over ownership of the name, or arguing about services provided from that name, they will be in their own jurisdiction and your UK solicitors will have to work in a foreign one to allow their business to continue to operate
100% wrong, they are very frequently used (Score:2)
I work in a solicitors in the UK. Our website address is .com, as is the address from a huge majority of solicitors who I have to look up daily in order to write to them.
What was the point of you writing this? You must know it's clearly wrong. "dot co dot you kay" is as well-knows as "dot com" in the UK. Of the 10 "local results" that come up when I type "solicitors" into Google, nine have a .co.uk domain for their website.
And how about: argos.co.uk, three.co.uk, orange.co.uk, bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, mtv.co.uk, ...
They don't seem as popular as .de in Germany (15M domains), but they're a lot more popular than .us (only 1M domains in a m
Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
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. .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).
(They could try and figure out some method of costfree assigning
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Step 6: After the last .uk domain expired, remove the .uk TLD.
That shouldn't ever happen. It would break huge numbers of old links, and disrupt other uses of domains (unique identifiers etc).
Accepting it won't ever happen, there's little point every trying. The UK code is reserved by ISO (will never be allocated), due to the potential for confusion.
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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] .
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It's messier than that.
"Great Britain" is the main island (containing engliand scotland and wales)
"The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the whole country
"United Kingdom" is a term that currently usually reffers to the above country but there have been other united kingdoms in the past.
In general when forming their country the ISO has preffered to use geographic terms from the country's name over parts of the name that represent how it is currently governed even if those geographic te
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At one time there were three countries without much geography in their common names:
United Kingdom (of...)
United States (of...)
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (no geography at all).
Then there's the (Roman) Empire and the (Roman) Catholic Church. Anglicans talk about a "catholic" church, meaning "universal," which is confusing.
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But it hasn't been a "Kingdom" since 1953 or so
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Much more funny is this explanation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 [youtube.com] by CGPGRey
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ISO is just plain wrong.
Consider Northern Ireland - a part of the United Kingdom. Neither .gb nor .ie (Republic of Ireland) would apply.
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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.
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.
Most-significant/highest-order first (Score:2)
Eminently sensible. ".com" should have been "us.co." from the start
An added advantage would be automatic prepending of your local country code, and perhaps even your choice of second-level, if omitted -- so "http://ge/" would map to us.co.ge for USA users and uk.co.ge for users in Llandudno.
Plenty of fun to be had with this system too, http://co.co.chanel/ [co.co.chanel] and http://be.me.up.scotty/ [me.up.scotty] for starters.
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> Eminently sensible. ".com" should have been "us.co." from the start
No, forcing everything into country-level hierarchies makes about as much sense as forcing people to go to some abomination like www.microsoft.co.wa.us.
Country-level domains are useful for identifying sites applicable to residents of a particular country.
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Are you sure that was part of thee DNS? Usenet used that kind of hierarchy: humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc, alt.binaries.nice, alt.tv, etc. Also, you see DNS names reversed like uk.co.bbc in algorithms. Makes a much more readable sorted list.
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I believe you mean JANet and the NRS, which used names along the lines of UK.AC.
Does anyone even care? (Score:4, Insightful)
One world, one internet, one stupid bit of identification that gets abstracted away within seconds. Why make the distinction at all?
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One single naming scheme with a limited number of meaningful words which has to support every user/organisation/company and product globally, even if most of those thing are only relavent locally.
It hasn't been abandoned! (Score:2)
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Nicked from Wikipedia
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.co is short for COmpany or COmmercial depending on your viewpoint. The purpose of DNS is to organise things neatly. So, in the correct spirit of this the UK name space has a nice organised set of sub-domains (see above or below for someone posting the Wikipedia list of them). Because people are stupid/lazy they don't want to learn to understand why this is good, and someone proposed flattening the layout for DNS at-large (the proposed .apple .microsoft etc.) and Nominet thought maybe they should do the sam
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It is a holdover from the JANET [wikipedia.org] naming system which was in reverse order from DNS and had a strict hierarchy of sub domains. email gateways between JANET and DNS-based internet would reverse the address components as necessary. The old naming hierarchy was maintained with the transition of the UK to DNS to maintain consistency through the transition.
It'll be alright. (Score:1)
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"
Perhaps the day will come when we all have to put "dot earth" at the end of our domain names.
And of course eventually "dot earth dot sol" after that.
"
Impractical until we get FTL communication - who wants to wait 9 years (at least) for a webpage to load (eg from Alpha Centauri)
Nathan Barley (Score:2)
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So in reality us Brits have to be able to work with either system and be able to convert between them.
Not really, you are only working with a small subset of imperial units. I bet that you don't even know how to convert between a Dutch and a French inch.
We don't need to - everyone knows the British inch is best :)
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> Not really, you are only working with a small subset of imperial units.
Newsflash: NOBODY, not even AMERICANS, uses the "full set" of imperial units in daily life. The main POINT Of imperial units, and why they persist, is because for some specific problem domains, they happen to work with nicer whole units that are more convenient for that purpose. Americans happily buy Diet Mountain Dew in 12oz cans and 2-liter bottles.
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I find "subzero" confusing in Canadian or British weather. Adds to the wind-chill confusion, but that is less common.
I read somewhere British phone numbers are the most difficult to remember. Maybe it's the punctuation, but I mostly like the U.S. system, except for the newer area code regime.
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Oh, and the billion as million-million thing too. Does the BBC still stick with "thousand million" and "million million" exclusively? Can't recall I've heard it recently.
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I don't think anybody thinks in terms of billion = million million over here these days (even the Treasury... though if you ask them, the poor sod who answers the phone might have to go and check... just to be sure...)
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We've given up, and billion means thousand million in British English now.
Even more embarrassing, we now called muffins "English Muffins", because everyone thinks muffins are those fluffy things baked in tins that Starbucks sell.
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