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Will A No-Deal Brexit Void 340,000 British-Owned .EU Domains? (theguardian.com) 212

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 "These .EU domain names will then be withdrawn and will become inoperable," states the guidance issued by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which confirms warnings issued this year by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.

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Will A No-Deal Brexit Void 340,000 British-Owned .EU Domains?

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  • 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.
    • by swimboy ( 30943 )

      Except for the fact that the domain will not be released for re-registration until a year after Brexit. By that time, everyone will have figured out how to find the new domain, or switched to a competitor.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • 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.

      I doubt any of the many .eu domains registered from UK will be missed by anyone.
  • 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 i

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      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.

    • by skegg ( 666571 )

      You've never tried to register a com.au, have you? It's fairly territorial.

  • 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

  • Worse (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JRiddell ( 216337 )

    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... [antipope.org]

    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

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      We heard the same gloom-and-doom (especially economic - multiple "respected" people saying the DJIA would crash to half its value) if President Trump was elected. Didn't come to pass. I don't think you're going to see what you predict, either. Care to place a wager on it? The UK is the 2nd largest economy in Europe, behind only Germany - do you think the EU will cut itself completely off from an economy that is bigger than 26 of the remaining 27 EU members?
    • Better (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

      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.

      • Bananas any bloody shape we want. Toddlers with tits because the food is full of hormones. Spitfires, three-pin plugs and Vera Lynn!

        • Re:Better (Score:4, Insightful)

          by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday March 09, 2019 @05:18PM (#58244156) Journal

          The bananas thing is penalty even more stupid thank you might realise. There is, like all the best lies a small grain of truth in it. There were rules, but they were OUR rules that we persuaded the EU to adopt.

          • The bananas thing is penalty

            Nah, just a free kick.

            even more stupid thank you

            You're welcome.

            Speech-to-text playing up?

            • Sigh looks like my autocorrect went nuts.

              The bananas thing is even more stupid. The rules were widely misrepresented, but the rules which did exist were our rules in the first place. Evil EU making everyone adopt our rules...

              • Indeed. But saying "it was them!" is pretty much on Farage's level.

                A better refutation would be on the actual merits of the system. It codified the categories (A=cosmetically perfect, B=edible but a bit spotty), IIRC. This may well make perfect sense if you're in the banana business.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Except that we won't be able to sell that stuff to the EU, and won't be able to compete with China and the US.

        Meanwhile everyone is back to working 48 hour weeks and gets to pay US prices for health insurance.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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

    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      The US was better off after leaving the UK. So was Singapore from Malaysia. And Brazil from Portugal. Just to name a few.

  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    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?

    • by Binestar ( 28861 )

      They won't use the whois search, they'll use the information they just hid.

      This isn't hard to figure out.

  • 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.

    • by _merlin ( 160982 )

      At the risk of being modded troll, gnaa.eu - but you've got to admit they've been a part of slashdot for a long time.

  • 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.

    • by stooo ( 2202012 )

      >>Either the person... has no clue...
      You have no clue about languages.
      "Léave" has no meaning whatsoever neither in Italian, nor in French.
      Also, we are not interested by your separatist bullshit, thank you very much.

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Either the person who made the summary is trolling, or he has no clue about the EU.

      While technically you're right I suspect it's not for the reason you think.

      The EU want to banish UK .eu domain owners even if the UK leaves with an agreed deal. 'No deal' is irrelevant on this one.

      It's petty nationalism by EU nationalists seeking to impose whatever pathetic punishments they can on anybody that dares challenge their authoritarian superstate ideals.

  • by Budenny ( 888916 ) on Saturday March 09, 2019 @10:23PM (#58245396)
    The underlying problem is a divergence of aims. The EU aims to become a federal state. This includes open internal borders, one currency, a supreme court, ministers, central bank, armed forces.

    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

    • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

      liberal urban media

      It's okay, on the New and Improved Slashdot you are allowed to say 'Jews' these days.

      • by Budenny ( 888916 )
        What an absolutely extraordinary idea!

        Are you suggesting that the UK mainstream press is in some way Jewish dominated? That is the kind of weird paranoid idiocy which seems to have taken root in some quarters of the Labour Party, but it is, obviously, just a paranoid fantasy.

        Or perhaps you are trying to suggest that I think it? Well, lets be explicit, just in case.

        If you look at the voting patterns and the support for Remain, either in the referendum itself or the post-referendum argument, there is

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