Subject-specific thread: Fairest .uk release mechanism?

So isn't it better for non profit organisations to stay on org.uk to avoid confusion.
If I am looking for gosh.org.uk I know where to go.

 

which domain name

Pretty much everybody would use a search engine,
if all they had was the name of the institution.

I would have thought naturalhistorymuseum.gov.uk
or naturalhistorymuseum.org.uk (which they own)
or at a push naturalhistorymuseum.ac.uk
unless it is a privately owned.
But instead they use nhm.ac.uk (as you pointed out)


Then I dont understand why London Zoo uses zsl.org, and doesn't use LondonZoo.co.uk which it owns
and why they dont take a Nominet DRS case out on the USA owner of LondonZoo.org.uk which was registered in 2009.

There are already legitimate ways for .org.uk owners to get the equivalent .co.uk via DRS or Nominet arbitration or even somtimes buy it!

 

You're just being deliberately difficult now I think, but thank you for providing me with another great example url.

Whether GOSH stay on their .org.uk or not is irrelevant - they need to control gosh.uk.

Or would it be better to just send the the parent looking to find out info on the ward their sick kid is in, or the grandparent looking to donate much needed cash to their funding appeal, to a .uk run by the guy who currently owns the .co.uk?

As he's going to win the domain on the 'earliest registrant'.

 

Be even more interesting to see how much they spend on lawyers

Edit: in fact squash that I thought it was the banks domain....

 

Well for a start, the chance of taking londonzoo.org.uk by force would be non existent - its a generic phrase and there is nothing to stop anyone opening a Zoo in London and using that domain.

Sure these people could try and buy names. But why not use the .uk release to sort out some clear problems with who owns what?

If the .uk release is genuinely to help make the UK internet space better... would it not make sense to use it to make sure the Queen and Great Ormond St Hospital, have their .uk domains?

 

Why should the Queen get preferential treatment? or do you mean Queen the band?

 

Because there is a clear public interest in a major charity receiving the .uk variant of their domain - just like Great Ormond Street Hospital and a variety of other easy to find examples.

If anyone disagrees with that, then I think they are only doing so due to self interest and knowing rules applied to facilitate it happening, will cost them other domains elsewhere, or cost them money.

 

muddled

I disagree, I think a DRS action againist the LondonZoo.org.uk would be successful, especially as it is clearly a "commercial site" in a .org.uk space.

It would certainly be an interesting test case for the use of .org.uk and the rights of a .co.uk owner.

Or seriously, hopefully arbitration would sort it out.

The idea that .uk would sort out inequities of who owns what is simply madness! it would create a far more muddled and confused landscape, of who should own what.

 

Great find Sean, I think the same as you, I can see there is going to be collateral damage and big lawyers will eventually get involved.

You weren't joking about them being a big outfit were you, http://www.smiles.co.uk/contact-us/

Maybe some on here could ring them and tell them how fair it all is, please record the call though so we can all have a SMILE

 

I don't agree with this point at all, in fact I think its as wrong as you could possibly be. I think there is far more confusion if sites and organisations you'd expect to find on a domain you typed in, can't be found there. If someone typed in Gosh.uk... then its obvious what 99% of them were looking for.

What better way to remove confusion, than to put a system in place that every major organisation like this, had their .uk?

 

Stephen has sort of replied to this already. I think that if Nominet had engaged members from the outset then the first consultation would have already been a proposal that could have been voted on and we wouldn't be at v2. That's where the yes/ no question should have been.
How many .org.uk names run by '.org' bodies predate the corresponding .co.uk? Is there even a definition by Nominet what constitutes an 'organisation'? They should be able to provide all of the stats/ documentation to support the consultation process surely?
In reply to your later post, I think that we'll probably see something like this anyway but then it doesn't add invetory to the uk webspace and that's always been one of Nominets' reasons. The more 'stages' there are in the realease process, the fewer names there'll be ftr.

 

I'm trying not to be difficult here but how do you define a 'major' organisation? By the greater amount of good that one does compared to another? How do you compare the activities of Scouts.org.uk to GOSH.org.uk (probably a bad example)? I don't think that it's up to us here to assume that anyone typing 'gosh' into their address bar is looking for a specific charity.
It looks like a date specific .uk rights or .co.uk grandfathering are coming out as the two most viable options so far.

 

alternative - out of the box ideas!

Are you now advocating
by volume of website traffic
or social importance
or how much the organization has spend on the date in time / money on their website
or how much turnover the owner has
or how popular they are on facebook
or how much tax they pay in the uk
that any or all of those should determine who gets the prized .uk

as an alterntive to either the 2 other front runners tld (i..e .co.uk )
or the oldest 3rd level registrant wins the .uk

also if we are carving up the UK name address system we also might want to look at hypens and plurals and extra suffix and prefix words so it is all put right on one big go, to find who should get all the .uk domains!

 

I appreciate this isn't an easy thing to judge... but any type of organisation that has a legitimate claim to saying they need the domain as people being able to find their site is clearly in the publics general interest. Obviously stuff like Scouts and Gosh.org.uk would be able to pass that barrier clearly, under any reasonable way you looked at it.

I would even extend this to commercial, for profit sites that potentially lost their .uk equivalents. I've not looked at their domains, reg dates or charity/commercial status so purely random examples, but I would be looking to give .uk domains to things like landmark hotels, Maddame Tussauds, london bridge, o2 arena, football stadiums, etc etc - things which undeniably do a lot for UK tourism and/or are used a lot by the UK general public.

Well if we launch .uk then either we need to give Gosh.uk to Great Ormond St Hospital, or we give it to an Essex marketing company consisting of 2 staff members.

We're going to create a load of type ins and with the nature of this some of them are clearly going to be wrong. I would suggest that its massively in the public interest to have 3 people who were looking for the marketing company, end up on the hospital site. Given that the alternative is to have 20,000 people looking for the hospital, ending up on the marketing site.

 

It would need to be done on a case by case basis. Social importance would probably be the biggest consideration.

 

Whatever release mechanism ends up being chosen, it has to be SIMPLE and with few (or no) exceptions.

Something that can be explained in 1 sentence is best.

"The oldest domain registrant gets the .uk"

"The .co.uk owner gets the .uk"

etc.

Both of the statements above are completely clear, and anyone reading them will INSTANTLY understand which party is likely to get a given .uk domain.

As soon as you start massaging the process to shoehorn in a particular group, or muscle out another, you're introducing a focal point for other "aggrieved" parties to use as leverage.

For example, if you say "charities only" then what about charities on generics? Non-profit - but not actual charities - on .org.uk? Charities who own an "older" .org.uk but who don't use it? Government bodies? Educational establishments? People who've played by the written rules, but not the alleged "unspoken" understanding surrounding the use of .org.uk?

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Start adding exceptions, and everyone not covered by the exception will come out of the woodwork to say "hey, why them but not us?"

For me, the ONLY exception that needs to be in place (regardless of release mechanism) is protection for the 2-letter/1-letter domain auction participants. There is very strong logic to support it, so Nominet has the necessary "cover" to treat them differently.

Everything else, well, keep it super-short-n-sweet and you ruffle the least feathers. Because the more feathers you ruffle, the more challenges will be mounted to your proposals, and the less likely they are to go anywhere at all.

 

Thats being extremely selective about which parts of the Nominet rules you take your information from.

Sounds good to me from a fairness point of view. Though not a personal interest one

 

Please, Sean. This is explicitly the thread for discussing the release mechanism. Not for arguing against the principle itself. Otherwise what's the point of trying to keep the discussions on track?

 

I agree with this. I think the thread shows that there isn't a fair way of introducting direct.uk. Nominet set out their stall many years ago and its impossible to unpick the situation without causing distress and financial hardship to many innocent people and organisations.

 

+1