51 
Why are we stuck with the awkward .co.uk, eh? It’s three characters too long, and stands out like a sore thumb against the chic of the .com guys. It turns out we’re stuck with it because no one showed any real interest in the shorter, cooler .uk domain idea, so much so that it’s been shelved. What the hell were we thinking?
Nominet, the UK’s web address controller, has basically said that after a three-month consultation, not enough people stuck their hands up and said, hell yeah, give me a .uk domain, which I think is nuts. I’d love a .uk domain, I don’t know about you, but there were a few catches that probably didn’t help.
For one, it’d be more expensive to register a .uk domain (isn’t everything when it’s the new hotness?), and there would be some requirements for increased security, and even the idea of some sort of verified “trust mark”. Not that the increased security provided by the likes of DNSSEC-signing would have been a bad thing, as it would have supposedly made hacking .uk sites harder at the domain level.
Anyway, the .uk domain has been shelved for now. Hopefully it’ll get resurrected once people see sense. [BBC]
Image credit: Internet from Shutterstock
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yes, thats less money i have to spend buying duplicate domains
But now we can’t make any money snapping up good domains.
FC.UK would have been a gold mine
You’d have had to surrender it to the French Connection chain as soon as they twigged, though, thanks to trademark law.
Stupid laws always ruining my fun.
Welcome to the European Union.
Agreed. I already spend enough making sure I have all the urls for my business. The fact I missed out on one pissed me off no end.
How did .co.uk come about in the first place? Why wasn’t it .uk from the beginning?
I think but dont take this as gospel, but I think it is because they seup the .co.xx to mean country followed by the two digit country code.
eg
co.uk
co.nz
co.za
I thought it was something to do with .co being corporation? Could be way off on that one though.
You’re right. And .com is meant to mean .company. Technically, you shouldn’t be registering either TlDs unless you own the name of the company/corporation named in it. Like most TlD ‘rules’, though, it has never really been adhered to.
.co is .com sortened and it means General-Commerical use.
I believe it’s ‘company’, but you’re on the same track. I believe .com is short form for company (the same way .org is for non-profit organisations), and because the majority of .com addresses are from the US, other companies used the .co.uk (etc) to define themselves as a company, but outside of the US.
There was no specific reason not to have second level registrations; they just didn’t do it in the beginning. But given that gov.uk was one of the first it clearly seemed right & just, to follow that of other ccTLDs — also, in the beginning, Nominet (.UK registrar) registrants were required to run their own nameservers – unless you were a Unix genius, This wasn’t going to be easy back then. Prior to .CO being ‘liberalised’, you couldn’t get a .co, you had to register at third-level. Many ccTLDs are the same in the beginning; no one really thought the mere mortals of society would buy or have a need for them. Until Network Solutions had .com taken off them and the price dropped from $100 to $10 then everyone went for it.
The “co” denotes it is a general use (commercial) domain and the last two character are the country of the domain.
It is basically using domains like .com and .org but just saying “Yeah, we are from the UK”
co.uk – General (Commercial)
me.uk – General (Personal)
org.uk – General (Non-Profit)
ac.uk – Academic
gov.uk – Government
nhs.uk – National Health Service
M-M-M-M-MULTIPOST!
SH-SH-SH-SH-SHUTYOURFACE! ;D
It was JANET’s NRS (Name Resolution Scheme) that created .co.uk. Under the “grey book” scheme, domains were referred to country first. The second level domains back then were uk.ac (for academia), uk.co (for commercial), uk.mod (for government). Other domains that fell outside the categories were granted second level domains of their own like uk.bl (for British Library) and uk.nel (for National Engineering Laboratory)
Part of the transitioning process of the early 1990s converted the janet to Internet Protocols (JIPS), and it is janet that is the reason why we use .uk instead of .gb.
well actually, the public were never getting them in the first place as grandfathering was never suggested. It was only for trademark holders. So really, with all the other goings on in the world of TLDs, the last thing we needed was Nominet offering more options at this already, fragile time thanks to ICANN. And at three times the current wholesale value! (£5 per 2 years if you’re lucky enough like me, to have a access to a tag).
This was a BAD thing.
The fact it’s failed is a GOOD thing.
The man on the street would NEVER have got a decent .uk anyway. Anything worth having would have been scooped up before they were available publicly. Yes, even if you owned the corresponding .co.uk, there was no guarantee you would have got it.
the ‘man on the street’ wasn’t allowed one anyway, so makes no difference. This was aimed solely at TM holders.
Interesting awkward.co.uk redirects to another.com who want $9.95 just for the privilege of having your bid refused.
Do Giz ever do any exposés on companies and their practice’s? This kind of webmongery looks like a good place to start.
Wow is this for real? I knew of people selling domains for retarded prices, but having people pay to bid is amazing.