Fasthosts registers customers' .uk domains – just for safekeeping ;)

[dig bick]

Hadn't seen this article from El Reg posted on here yet -

Remember the Nominet £100m dot-uk windfall it claims doesn't exist?

Well, it's already begun
Fasthosts registers all its customers' .uk domain names – just for safekeeping, you understand

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/24/nominet_fasthosts_domain_names/

 

[RobM]

'If someone else registers your .uk domain, you or your organisation could be at risk of impersonation'

Umm I thought nominet said that the uk *wasn't* a blackmail for the rights holder? They said they wanted to increase the amount of people who could get domains blah blah *cough* bs blah

 

[martin-s]

Nominet lost their way a long time ago, but it'll be another year or two before the poop really hits the fan over the .uk debacle.

 

[Siusaidh]

To be honest, I think the truth is that nobody (that is to say, most of the general public) cares.

And that is why Nominet have little to worry about over this.

It was the same with ICANN and the new registries when .info and .biz were released.

They calculated correctly that laissez faire would win the day.

Yes, some people protested, but afterwards life just carried on.

Registries and registrars exist in a symbiotic relationship. The 'At Large' sector of ordinary internet users are listened to but they are ineffectual sideline players.

The key question I'd ask both Nominet and Fasthosts is this, when they justify the 'window of opportunity' when registrars could mass register because the price was reduced to zero so it cost Fasthosts, Ionos etc zero to pull off the stunt:

If this was allowed to give .co.uk holders more time to register (after 5 years!)... why didn't Nominet just extend the period to 6 years in the first place? On the basis of their 'principles' of protecting the .co.uk holders, Fasthosts should be given another 'zero cost' window next June.

The claimed concern about businesses losing their brand identity with .uk is spurious.

They were happy to create the problem by introducing .uk in the first place.

Then they set up a process, saying the public could register the names after 5 years. Now they have allowed that process to be compromised but, as I say, no-one significant really cares, and registries and registrars benefit by existing for each other.

Should there be a distance created between people involved in registrar business and the people involved in the UK's registry administering the UK's namespace? I'd say there should (apologies to all here who are Nominet members). Otherwise there is an obvious conflict of interest in the administration of the UK namespace.

But most of the public and politicians don't seem to care about any of this.

 

[Siusaidh]

Ben, if your clients' .co.uk. domains were registered before 28th October 2013, they can request Fasthosts to make the .uk domains available. In fact, a straight transfer request to their Fasthosts account should work (it worked for me).

 

[Nigel]

No way, is this what happened? I had a couple of clients who approached me to register their .uk domains, with their .co.uk registered at Fasthosts, I'd taken payment in advance and had to refund them as Fasthosts had registered them. Unbelievable.

Might be worth you contacting fasthosts using support. I noticed that they'd registered a few of my personal domains, so I contacted them and got them transferred into my personal fasthosts account a few days later. Not sure why fasthosts haven't just automatically added all of these domains to the rights holder's accounts - like 20i did for our company's domains. 20i did a really professional job with no problems whatsoever. So it could have easily been done.

 

[stitchbob]

[QUOTE="Not sure why fasthosts haven't just automatically added all of these domains to the rights holder's accounts.[/QUOTE]

If your aim is to register domains on behalf of your customers, you add them automatically to your customers accounts. If your goal is to get your pick of premium domains without using your valuable ROR allocation, you discreetly register everything on your TAG and hope the rights holders don't notice.

 

[Siusaidh]

I don't think they will, Ben. If they'd paid loads for this mass registering then I could see they might offload them, but as Nominet provided the window of opportunity to get them all for just about zero, why would Fasthosts 'provide customers with a chance to protect their .co.uk domains for one month', when they can provide that same opportunity for twelve months, with the chance of later registrations and making more money?