If Scotland became independent then it would get assigned it's own ccTLD too, which would put it in the rather humorous position of having three extensions- the old ccTLD (.co.uk) which I'd bet most companies would keep their domains in especially as a lot will probably continue to trade with the rest of the UK, their 'cultural' sTLD (.sco) and their new ccTLD (.aa? or whatever). I know if Scotland/Wales leave the UK then they're automatically out of the EU- I don't know enough about Scotland to comment, but it would be a disaster for Wales so I don't see Wales getting out anytime soon (perhaps England leaving the UK is the best answer for everybody? :lol
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I think .co.uk will continue to dominate and be the 'professional' and trusted choice. It all depends on how well the extension is marketed. .pro is an excellent idea on paper, but a lack of marketing by the registry and domain holders (so far) means that not many net users would recognise it as an extension.
.cym will likely be a very insular extension probably used for a narrow range of Welsh-language sites that viewers of S4/C will become familiar enough with to use. Although a possible (though unlikely) typo of .com you could get a lot of silly 'typo' registrations- though I doubt this will have an impact as these registrations will be likely be English words and corporation names- most of which won't exist in Welsh.
.sco will be a 50/50 extension with quite a lot of speculation (a bunch of parked names that get dropped after two years), but balanced out by a big number of sites from sectors of the media, the Scottish parliament and Scottish businesses- as a rather nationalistic people I anticipate it will be embraced and promoted so that it does become a normal extension (alongside .co.uk) in the minds of the Scots.
.eng (which I hadn't heard about until today) is likely to be the most heavily speculated of the three and therefore the most likely to fail as an extension that its intended audience ever come to accept. Because of England's huge (relative to Scotland & Wales) population and the sheer number of people who speak English globally, this could be the one bought out by the 'next big thing' crowd.
Of course all this is speculation on my part, anything could happen- I thought .asia was going to be a lot less popular with the previously mentioned 'next big thing' crowd than it turned out to be!!!
Depending on cost, I
may register just one .cym for a Welsh-language site. But will most likely ignore the others completely. I really don't like these 'cultural' sTLDs and believe the better solution may have been for the managers of the ccTLDs to offer a second-level domain/extension- e.g. .cym.uk, .sco.uk, .eng.uk, .ca.es (instead of .cat).
