Talk:.uk/Archive 1

.K12
The end of Allocation of domain names is inaccurate. In the US, school districts, which can be likened to local education authorities, each have domains such as  (though many now use less buried addresses like www.lovelandschools.org). In this address, the US ccTLD comes at the end, preceded by the state domain (Ohio), preceded by the  domain. This  domain is used like the   domain: for "schools, primary, and secondary education" – in fact, it's named for K-12 (Kindergarten–12th grade) education. Finally, district's domain may have subdomains for individual schools.

This section makes it sound like  is the only school-specific domain, but that schools have to register their own   or   domain. That's not true, although many schools do opt to do so, because  or   domains are much easier to remember.

– Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 23:52, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Why the '.co' in '.co.uk'?
The article mentions that it is prohibited to register a domain name directly under .uk (such as .internet.uk), but it doesn't say why. Does anyone know? Because I sure can't find out.


 * Because, like a number of other country code domains, .uk has chosen to subdivide its space by category, separating companies (.co.uk) from organizations (.org.uk), and some other categories like .gov.uk for the government. *Dan T.* 00:38, 25 October 2006 (UTC)


 * But why has this strange decision been taken? And why .co and not the standard .com? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.100.53.80 (talk) 15:38, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Ukraine
I remember reading a story in the early/mid 90's about the Ukraine making a claim for ownership of the .uk top level domain. I cannot find any reference to this now. The official 2-character ISO country code for Ukraine is 'UA', which makes this idea seem less credible, but I wonder if there is any reference to this story that would add value to this entry? --Davagh (talk) 00:06, 13 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I have heard similar stories and believe them to be true, but the only references I can find are blogs by people I don't recognise. By the way, I think Ukraine dislikes being called "the Ukraine". Certes (talk) 22:39, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Certain places seem to have wound up with the definite article before them in normal English usage, for some reason, including the New York City borough of The Bronx. *Dan T.* (talk) 00:16, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

.Eng
There was also a proposal for England to have a separate internet address. It was supposed to be either .en.uk, .en or .eng (both en and eng were rejected because they are used to show when a webpage is in English). 80.192.246.56 (talk) 22:20, 10 February 2008 (UTC)Falcon-eagle200780.192.246.56 (talk) 22:20, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Northern Ireland/The six counties
Should the article mention that .uk us is bound to continue even if Northern Ireland ceases to be politically joined to Great Britain as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? --81.105.251.160 10:27, 28 September 2006 (UTC)


 * It seems a somewhat irrelevant point to make - the country would still be the United Kingdom. Shimgray | talk | 10:52, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah and the fact Northern Ireland leaving the UK is a minority position that is weakening every day thank God! We don't need any nationalist propoganda creeping into a UK article thank you very much. ``

Northern Ireland isnt going to leave the UK, unless it has a damn good reason to (If it is because it wants to be run seperately from the UK, it would just go back to Ireland. 'cliché') —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.192.246.56 (talk) 22:29, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

.Me.uk
are you sure .me.uk is rejected, you can register domains under that name.. (have a look on 1and1.co.uk) 86.2.113.39 17:41, 9 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Apparently there were two different original proposals for .me.uk, and one was accepted and the other rejected, which is why it shows up in both lists. *Dan T.* 18:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Since it actually has been accepted wouldn't it make sense to eliminate it entirely from the "rejected" list? I understand that multiple proposals were made (according to the above statement), but the fact is, it has been accepted. Shouldn't matter how many rejections it went through on the way. It's like applying for a job. If you re-apply after you've been rejected once, and finally get the job, do you then still log that as a rejection? No, just took two tries. Crocadillion (talk) 00:57, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Why .co.uk and not .com.uk?
Some domains use .co (.co.uk, .co.nz) whereas others use .com (.com.au). Why use .co? I would have thought they would have just copied the ".com" and add their own domain after it - why drop the m?


 * It's just how that particular country code developed; the people in charge of Internet naming in each country get to make independent decisions, and didn't always decide it the same way. There is no "standard" about how a country code domain is to be subdivided. *Dan T.* 16:03, 18 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Bear in mind that the use of ac and co dates back to Janet days too - and at the time, with a non-Internet network, what would be the rationale of following the American system? (especially as it took no account of other countries in its naming convention. .us remains somewhat of a minority TLD). In Janet naming, institutions had full and abbreviated names; many used two-letter abbreviated names (these were carried over - look at UK academic domains and many are very abbreviated). If the other elements are short, the second-level might as well be. JohnGray 01:09, 14 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Also probably because 'Co' is a longstanding abbreviation for Company, as in 'Joe Boggs & Co'. cdv 14 Mar 2008 —Preceding comment was added at 10:33, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Usually .co. is used by a country that is made up of smaller united countries or automonous counties —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.192.246.56 (talk) 22:24, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Gary brammel
gary brammel is a person who lives in clifton, nottingham and founded high bank primary school in 1953 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Moogee (talk • contribs) 01:24, 6 December 2008 (UTC)


 * What does this have to do with the .uk domain (or the price of tea in China)? *Dan T.* (talk) 02:12, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Most popular TLDs?
quote from .de: .de is currently the second most popular ccTLD in terms of number of registrations, after .cn, and is third after .com and .cn among all TLDs.

quote from this page: As of July 2008, it is the fifth most popular top-level domain worldwide (after .com, .cn, .de and .net), with over 7 million registrations.[2]

I guess that is an unacceptable inconsistency... (please note that I will also post this on .de's talk page) —Preceding unsigned comment added by My name is Jasper (talk • contribs) 13:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

.Uk / .gb
It is somewhat contentious to say in the second paragraph that 'the use of .uk rather than .gb is due to pre-existing use in JANET'. 'UK' is also the correct name for the sovereign state (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland); Great Britain is only a part of the state, and is not a formal entity of any kind, as far as I am aware.

It is arguably ISO 3166 which is anomalous. ISO say:


 * The codes in ISO 3166-1 are - wherever possible - chosen to reflect the significant, unique component of the country name in order to allow a visual association between country name and country code. Since name components like Republic, Kingdom, United, Federal or Democratic are used very often in country names we usually do not derive the country code elements from them in order to avoid ambiguity. The name components United and Kingdom not being approriate for ISO 3166-1, the code GB for the United Kingdom was created from Great Britain. (http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166-faqs/iso_3166_faqs_specific.htm)

However, in general usage, no-one normally uses 'GB': to refer to the component countries collectively, people say 'the UK'.

JANET used uk.ac.university; I'm sure that could have been converted to university.ac.gb rather than place.ac.uk had .gb been the preferred TLD. I would expect people preferred to follow common usage rather than ISO 3166.

I suggest we revise the second paragraph.

– cdv —Preceding unsigned comment added by CDV (talk • contribs) 12:56, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Then why did ISO assign "US" as the code for the United States? "United" and "States" are the same sorts of generic components they're supposedly avoiding. *Dan T.* (talk) 13:17, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Speculation about "Northern Ireland" is something of a red herring. GB was the correct general designator for the country even when the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland prior to 1922. Indeed, there has been more than one united kingdom in the world. The ISO list is not the anomaly; the modern use of 'the UK' is. For nearly every other international designation GB is used in preference to UK. For example, the correct postal address for the country as a whole is GB rather than UK, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales etc (Universal Postal Union 1885).

Attempts to obtain a rational explanation from UKERNA and the British Government concerning the suppression of the .gb domain met with evasive, uncertain and vague responses, even as to who took this decision. It might possibly be indirectly related to the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to change the 'GB' vehicle national identification letters to 'UK' post-1997. It seems a strange decision to positively prohibit the use of this extant domain in a purportedly 'free market' economy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.235.9.165 (talk) 14:49, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Police.uk
Today a new police website launched with the URL "police.uk". Is this a new domain that has been registered with the .uk top level domain with special permission or something? Or is it an old one that was registered before the creation of Nominet UK, that has simply not been used for some time? 92.41.192.179 (talk) 18:23, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Dead link
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!


 * http://www.webcitation.org,5hDNCEOm6
 * In .uk on 2011-05-20 22:33:10, Socket Error: 'getaddrinfo failed'
 * In .uk on 2011-05-31 15:15:53, Socket Error: 'getaddrinfo failed'

--JeffGBot (talk) 15:16, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Discussion re domain names at Talk:Northern Ireland
A discussion is taking place at the above page relating to what domain name or domain names whould be listed for Northern Ireland (if any). I am a participant in the discussion so do not wish to be seen to be canvassing here so I simply encourage more Editors to get involved at Talk: Northern Ireland. For balance I am also making this post on the .ie talk page. Frenchmalawi (talk) 17:26, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Howard Burroughs
I take a course on the basics on the internet and DNS at my university, a course which has taught me about Howard Burroughs and his current ownership of the .uk domain. If any new citations are found please add but don't bully new users and blindly remove factual posts. Big love from iTajjx (talk) 13:16, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find any sources that mention Howard Burroughs owning the TLD, or that link him to Nominet at all, and unsourced claims about living people should always be deleted. I dug up a source that says "Nominet began registering Domain Names on 1 August 1996 and is now officially recognised by the UK Government as the manager of the .uk TLD." - if you can find a source that says otherwise, feel free to swap that in. --McGeddon (talk) 13:22, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
 * (It looks like the Howard Burroughs thing is just somebody's obscure in-joke, there have been some silly IP edits along the same lines over the past year, to this and related articles.) --McGeddon (talk) 13:49, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Registrations directly under .uk
Registrations directly under .uk are permitted from summer 2014. Source. Rob (talk) 23:58, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

.Net.uk
there is a strange website at www.net.uk, why is this and who put it there. the descrp just says it's for ISP's, what's it history 87.113.82.36 12:37, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Looks like it's just somebody who has registered www.net.uk in order to attract traffic to his squish.net site. Note that although that LOOKS like the www server sub-domain on the front of a net.uk registered domain, in fact his domain is www.net.uk, since he can't own the SLD .net.uk 87.114.112.151 (talk) 22:07, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

"co. = commonwealth"
Someone was trying to convince me .co. stands from commonwealth. I thought it's commercial or company. Does it have any merit? --AaThinker (talk) 11:26, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * None whatsoever. 87.114.112.151 (talk) 22:11, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

usage of subdomain .co.uk
As I understand it, .co.uk was made available in the UK as a clearly 'UK' based indication that the company was based in the UK, in contrast with .com which implied a USA base. Private individuals in the UK who wanted their own 'UK based domain' names for personal use had no option other than .co.uk. Consequently I suspect that there are many .co.uk domains that are personal rather than commercial. It is also possible that there are more personal .co.uk domains than commercial ones.

In due course the domain .me.uk was made available, and doubtless there was some take-up of that option for personal use. But I also feel that .me.uk has not been particularly popular, and that .co.uk remained the domain-name of choice for personal users.

Now that .uk has been made available, it has proven to be very popular. Even so, I suspect that inertia will still result in a preponderance of existing .co.uk domains remaining as 'personal' domains, both for websites and as a base for personalised email addresses. If this is so, then maybe the indication that .co.uk domains are "usually commercial" needs clarification or modification.--Lepton6 (talk) 17:03, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * The UK zone is probably still massively .co.uk in nature as there were approximately 10 million .co.uk domains registered. This is unlikely to have changed much. The co in .co.uk is the commercial indicator and because it is the most popular subdomain, it is used by businesses and individuals. Traditionally, the personal subdomains in ccTLDs are less successful becaus they are typically made available years after the ccTLD is launched and the bulk of registrants wishing to have their own personal domains would have already registered a .co.uk domain name. Jmccormac (talk) 21:14, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Jmccormac. Therefore, even though the inclusion of '.co' in .co.uk is a commercial indicator, if it is true that there are actually more 'personal' domains than commercial domains, then the line in the article which says that .co.uk usage is 'general (usually commercial)' would be inaccurate. Similarly, even if the commercial v. personal(individual) balance were even roughly equal it would still be inaccurate to describe .co.uk as 'usually commercial'. If either of those two scenarios are true, or even 'likely', perhaps it would be better to describe .co.uk usage as "general (commercial and personal)" rather than simply "general (usually commercial)". Just a thought!--Lepton6 (talk) 22:38, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Separating personal websites from commercial websites is very difficult, Lepton6. I regularly run surveys on web usage and there has been a trend where webdevelopers increasingly use blogging software like Wordpress for website development so it is now even harder to tell ordinary personal blogs from commercial sites and their associated blogs without analysing the text and links. The use of .co.uk would be primarily commercial (that might be a better way of explaining it) but also includes some personal websites/usage. Commercial usage would be far greater than personal usage though. There are registrant breakdowns published in the annual ccTLD registry reports but I am not sure if Nominet includes such data. Jmccormac (talk) 23:57, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Jmccormac. If separating personal from commercial registration of .co.uk domains is difficult, then the assertion that .co.uk domains are 'usually commercial' would be an assumption rather than a fact. While not denying the possibility that most .co.uk domains could reasonably be regarded as more often used for commercial purposes than by individuals for personal purposes e.g. hobbyists and web-savvy individuals, in the absence of hard data I remain unconvinced that this is necessarily so.Lepton6 Lepton6 (talk) 00:50, 19 November 2014 (UTC) (+ subsequent minor edits)

On the basis of what is known, I propose changing the description of the usage of .co.uk from "- general (usually commercial)" to "- commercial and general", which I feel would be more accurate and avoids committing ourselves to making an statement which cannot be verified.--Lepton6 (talk) 09:46, 20 November 2014 (UTC)
 * The problem is that only Nominet would have accurate statistics of the registrant types. Even web surveys don't generally differentiate the two. I think that the .me.uk subdomain was added after the .co.uk subdomain so therefore many of the people who would have registered a personal domain name had already done so by the time .me was launched. The .co.uk would be overwhelmingly commercial in nature. Typically the personal use domain names in a TLD only represent a small (<10%) part of a TLD. (This is based on reading registry reports on other TLDs rather than Nominet's reports.) There is a way to derive an estimate of commerical usage by running a company name parser against the data from a .uk web survey and looking for business indications. The last co.uk web survey I ran covered 110K domains and Wikipedia might consider any business/personal breakdown research on this data to be "original research". Nominet did a 5K domain survey a few years ago (possibly 2011) and it may have had some indications of the registrant types but I can't seem to find it on their website. The phrase "commercial and general" is an accurate description and I have no problem with that. Jmccormac (talk) 10:55, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your response, Jmccormac. Another difficulty in attempting to classify the commercial v. personal mix of registrants is that this cannot readily be determined by a (simple?) survey of websites, because doubtless many .co.uk domains have been registered but which do not have a direct web presence; and some of these may also have been registered solely for personal and other non-commercial purposes. Conclusion: Having considered the whole matter and your invaluable feedback, I have made the proposed edit, which, being an arguably reasonable generalisation, is unlikely to be challenged. Thanks again. --Lepton6 (talk) 13:55, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Many gov.uk migrating to .org.uk
Lots of government organisations seem to be moving from gov.uk to .org.uk. After Ofcom, the Information Commissioner is I think the latest. This seems odd to me as they are still very much part of the government. Would a mention of this trend be relevant in the article? Mongoosander (talk) 20:53, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Sources modified on .uk
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just attempted to maintain the sources on .uk. I managed to add archive links to 1 1 source, out of the total 1 I modified, whiling tagging 0 as dead.

Please take a moment to review my changes to verify that the change is accurate and correct. If it isn't, please modify it accordingly and if necessary tag that source with to keep Cyberbot from modifying it any further. Alternatively, you can also add  to keep me off the page's sources altogether. Let other users know that you have reviewed my edit by leaving a comment on this post.

Below, I have included a list of modifications I've made:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20120716155259/http://www.nominet.org.uk/intelligence/statistics/registration/ to http://www.nominet.org.uk/intelligence/statistics/registration/

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 15:41, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Microsoft Word
I purchased a year subscription but no longer have Internet access at home. Word won't allow me access to write letters, can anyone tell me how to resolve this? Jgb69 (talk) 22:52, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Missing second level domains
Why are the following second level domains not included on this page:

.royal.uk

.parliament.uk

.dsma.uk

.bl.uk and .british-library.uk

.nls.uk

.icnet.uk

.jet.uk

What else is missing? Tarian.liber (talk) 18:15, 29 May 2018 (UTC)


 * No. these are not 2nd level doamins. These are just orinary domains registered under the 1st level (with possible subdomains). how is bl.uk a second level? it's just a normal domain since there indeed is a owner and a website at www.bl.uk
 * These "2nd levels" are no diffrent than say www.waterbobble.uk The only diffrence is, that they whre registered befor the public was able to register first level domains.
 * Which is – btw – not that uncommen, that "special" companys or institutions are/were exempt from some rules. e.g. under Germany's .de it wasn't possible to register two-letter-domains until a couple years ago. Yet Deutsche Bahn had managed to own www.db.de way before the rules were relaxed.
 * In summery: No 2nd levels, just preferential treatment of some institutions. --80.88.23.171 (talk) 11:57, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Verification of fact on ac.uk for learned societies
I was updating the article to substitute 'Archived copy' instances and did a cursory look at this line:

.ac.uk domains are intended for the use of higher education institutions and further education colleges, and are also used by some academic support bodies such as the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service public research establishments, and learned societies such as the Royal Society.

The Royal Society no longer use .ac.uk. A sample check against List of learned societies shows official URLs ending with .org or .org.uk. Is there a change in policy regarding .ac.uk? If so, should this change be reflected here? robertsky (talk) 22:12, 14 September 2019 (UTC)