Guardian

Dave Thomas, head of Sedo UK and a member of Nominet’s stakeholder committee, gives another take on Nominet’s direct.uk consultation, assessing potential impact on UK business.

I did some comparison using SEDO’s trading history of the Spanish domain market comparing .com.es to .es – it is clearly to me that there is now a preference for .es over .com.es. This indicates that there’s a real appetite from businesses and consumers to migrate over time to a shorter direct name space. Although, on the other hand, if you consider that the United States launched a shorter name space in 1985, when the internet was in its infancy, it has had little or no real effect as the majority of US companies and consumers prefer using .com to this day. Therefore, we are in the dark whether direct.uk will have an impact on the value of .co.uk.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/dec/21/dave-thomas-nominet-directuk-consultation

Do you have plans to purchase a .co.uk domain for your business? Adam Grunwerg thinks you might want to think again:

Nominet, the non-profit organisation responsible for managing the UK namespace, recently launched a three-month consultation on a direct.uk domain name service, which means you’ll soon be able to register UK names at the second level – in the forma yourbusiness.uk – in 2013.

The new .uk domain service will provide a shorter string for UK businesses and has plans to include a number of security benefits to promote a secure UK namespace, which includes UK address verification, daily malware monitoring and a digital signature.

However, the current proposal for the new direct.uk domains and the release structure has caused significant backlash from Nominet’s main stakeholders – especially registrars, UK businesses and the domain community.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/dec/13/nominet-plans-direct-uk-domain

Nominet’s Phil Kingsland responds to Adam Grunwerg’s criticism of the company’s proposed launch of the .uk domain:

We’ve read and listened to a wide range of responses and views on Nominet’s proposal to introduce a new, more secure second-level domain space in the UK (ie yourbusiness.uk instead of yourbusiness.co.uk), alongside the additional third level .uk domains (.co.uk, .org.uk etc). This includes last week’s Media Network article by Adam Grunwerg.

We believe that the proposed product would create a new, trusted online home for British businesses and we hope it would help to support the internet economy by combating cybercrime and creating a namespace which consumers trust; driving additional e-commerce and online transactions.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/dec/17/value-secure-uk-namespace-nominet