The fairest is to let the .co.uk name holders have the first opportunity at .uk. At least, that's what I think and what I wrote.
Here's the logic:
1) .co.uk has been marketed as the extension for business/commerce since pretty much the very beginning AND it has been up until now the only such extension promoted for that purpose (and therefore the "default choice")
2) Due to 1), the vast majority of for profit enterprises have registered and used .co.uk domains (though this has changed a bit in recent years with .org.uk etc. due to unavailability, it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the overwhelming commercial use of .co.uk)
3) Due to 1) and 2), the collective amount of money poured into branding ".co.uk" by businesses established on a ".co.uk" domain must run into the hundreds of billions of pounds since .co.uk's inception. This includes:
- Online marketing/advertising
- Other "overt" types of marketing, e.g. TV, radio, media ads (which Nominet's own surveys have demonstrated contain a URL the vast majority of the time)
- All other "passive" displays of the URL which also act to brand it (e.g. the name in email addresses, on business cards, on brochures, on letterheads, on invoices etc.) - collectively this might even add up to more than all the other categories above since
URLs are everywhere.
It is because of that almost unimaginably large amount of collective expenditure that .co.uk has such a strong, trusted presence (again, Nominet's own surveys have been at great pains to demonstrate the latter).
But if TM holders go first, that means that generic domain holders who don't have TMs (because the domains are GENERIC) lose out to Johnny come latelies. For instance, there are live trademarks on "Amazon" that predate Amazon (the bookseller) but it's almost unconscionable to imagine handing over "amazon.uk" (a domain that will get millions of visitors a month 100% down to Amazon the bookseller's fame and branding efforts) to one of those TM holders.
Yet that is what Nominet is proposing.
It is incredibly important to remember that there was/is NO CHOICE: if you're in business and take your business seriously, it's .co.uk all the way for UK businesses - Nominet has been drumming that message home as loudly as possible. So every single domain name that gets registered and used is contributing to branding ".co.uk" on Nominet's behalf and inflating the value of that extension. Yet Nominet proposes to (potentially) dismantle a lot of that overnight!
Of course the above reads as self-serving, but that doesn't take away for one second the fact that it's ALSO true!
