discuss A random musing on .uk

[TheDev]

I typed in co.uk just to see if it was an actual website. It doesn't seem to resolve and redirects to "co.uk/" without https and www. The "site can't be reached" it claims. I'm assuming this particular domain has been decommissioned or whatever you'd like to call it because of the obvious reason. Say a real entity decided to use it and they had permission to, would this domain be able to have subdomains? This would, of course, interfere with the current natural state of the internet due to .co.uk domains and I just wanted to see what everyone thought about this random thought of mine.

Why'd the world decide to even create .co.uk instead of a simple .uk in the first place? Is there a real reason behind this? Why is there no .co.tv or .co.nl?

 

[HotKey]

r u serious

 

[TheDev]

r u serious

Tf?

Is this not a valid question? I'm genuinely curious.

 

[jmcc]

Research is an important part of Domaining. This might help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk#History

Regards...jmcc

 

[Recons.Com]

I typed in co.uk just to see if it was an actual website. It doesn't seem to resolve and redirects to "co.uk/" without https and www. The "site can't be reached" it claims. I'm assuming this particular domain has been decommissioned or whatever you'd like to call it because of the obvious reason. Say a real entity decided to use it and they had permission to, would this domain be able to have subdomains? This would, of course, interfere with the current natural state of the internet due to .co.uk domains and I just wanted to see what everyone thought about this random thought of mine.

Why'd the world decide to even create .co.uk instead of a simple .uk in the first place? Is there a real reason behind this? Why is there no .co.tv or .co.nl?

Some countries decided to create options similar to the global offering. They had to have .co or .com for the commercial, .or or .org for non-profit and some even went for pp or ind for physical persons.

In the retrospect, it is a dumb decision that creates an extra unnecessary string and establishes branding confusion, when there could be few entities under the same brand name.

UK decided to kind of reverse this by allowing .uk (as did some other countries) and even established some rules who had priority to claim it first, but that, again, created even more confusion as not all businesses were savvy enough to claim it in time. So now there could be two commercial entities owning the same exact URL with either .co.uk or .uk

 

[Dannoth]

As a Brit... you could only register .co.uk / .org.uk / .me.uk etc for some time.

I suspect someone in Government (probably DCMS in one of its previous iterations) wanted to keep dot.uk free so that they could expand Governmental subdomains (mod.uk / police.uk / nhs.uk etc)

But around 2014 anyone who owned domain.co.uk could then purchase domain.uk - think it lasted three years, then it was a free for all.

Now it's a no brainer - why would you register a dot.co.uk and not the dot.uk? You'd be surprised how many people still do it though.

Hope that makes sense.

 

[wizard]

As a Brit... you could only register .co.uk / .org.uk / .me.uk etc for some time.

I suspect someone in Government (probably DCMS in one of its previous iterations) wanted to keep dot.uk free so that they could expand Governmental subdomains (mod.uk / police.uk / nhs.uk etc)

But around 2014 anyone who owned domain.co.uk could then purchase domain.uk - think it lasted three years, then it was a free for all.

Now it's a no brainer - why would you register a dot.co.uk and not the dot.uk? You'd be surprised how many people still do it though.

Hope that makes sense.

People dont want the .UK as a big investor into the UK market the co.uk is still the king they launched .uk too late

 

[BaileyUK]

As Wizard has stated. The co.uk extension was already well established and in use by all businesses that wanted to have a UK web presence at the time. The introduction by NOMINET of just the dot UK came far too late in the day for it to create some sort of re-birth of the whole UK domain system. It was and still is seen as just a money making exercise by Nominet. But at the end of the day people and business in general don't want two separate identities for their web presence - So it fell flat.

Now you might think that business and individuals would prefer the shorter .UK. But that has not proved to be the case, They just don't want to make the change, And of course there is no real reason to do so apart from aesthetics. Those that launch on the .UK only lose most of their traffic to the .co.uk. It's the natural type in for all of us.

Furthermore , there's very little demand for the shorter .uk on the secondary mark, probably about 1% of the total. You need a very strong word to create any interest and even then the price is generally about 10% of .co.uk value. The one exception appears to be place, town or city names. where the .CO for Company element is perhaps seen as a bit of a misnomer.

Yep, We Brits are very dogged in the our nature. Cynicism is almost an instinct

 

[jmcc]

The launch of the .uk seemed to be trying to cash in on the new gTLD vibe but it was woefully misguided. Some of the early ideas about cost were not quite grounded in reality. It was, initially, an attempt to create a regulated/managed "subdomain" for verified customers with the .uk registration fee being a multiple of that of .co.uk (I think it was around £100.). The problem was that people didn't seem interested and the new gTLDs didn't work out quite as planned.

The launch of the .uk was a bit of a mess with some large non-UK registrars who provide registrations as a service not being aware of the updated registration terms. That lost quite a few registrations. Then there were UK registrars adding free .uk registrations to registrant accounts with the .co.uk in the hope it would convert to another reg fee. It resulted in a mini Junk Dump as many of them were not renewed.

The last 150K .UK web usage survey that I ran showed most .uk websites in the survey redirecting to the equivalent .co.uk. The .UK already has a well established domainer market and simply applying .COM rules to the .uk subdomain is a great way to lose money. Most of the high value .uk domain names have been gone for years.

Regards...jmcc