You'll still need to own your .co.uk if you're a business, or else you'll have a squatter on it before you can blink, but now you'll be paying Nominet's fee of around £20 a year for a .uk, and £3.50 for your .co.uk
The article does say that any additional earnings derived would be passed onto an independent trust to invest in improving internet access and security. Nominet itself is not-for-profit. And there's at least some support for this URL-shortening change in this thread.
The fact that it is not for profit doesn't mean that it doesn't want to grow revenue. More money for salaries, more staff, more prestige for managing a big organisation. Plus their direct customers who they have relationships with are the registrars who have a profit motive in selling more domains.
It is quite possible for a not-for-profit to become a self expanding bureaucracy especially when it is gatekeeper/distributor over a resource. That said I'd take Nominet over getting Verisign to do it. The same risks apply in a commercial setting plus the push to profit.
Now I don't know the realities of Nominet or this particular proposal but I wanted to point out that in a case like this being not-for-profit is an insufficient defence against claims it is a revenue grab.
If they wanted it to be revenue neutral, they'd simply say "Any .co.uk now gets .uk free, except where there's a conflicting .org, .me or .ac", where there'd been to be some kind of conflict resolution process (possibly as simple as oldest registered version wins).
I'm happy with Nominet's administration in general, but as far as I can see this is just about increasing revenue while making a long overdue change.
Comments
This reads like a nice revenue grab by Nominet.
You'll still need to own your .co.uk if you're a business, or else you'll have a squatter on it before you can blink, but now you'll be paying Nominet's fee of around £20 a year for a .uk, and £3.50 for your .co.uk
The article does say that any additional earnings derived would be passed onto an independent trust to invest in improving internet access and security. Nominet itself is not-for-profit. And there's at least some support for this URL-shortening change in this thread.
It doesn't seem like a revenue grab to me.
The fact that it is not for profit doesn't mean that it doesn't want to grow revenue. More money for salaries, more staff, more prestige for managing a big organisation. Plus their direct customers who they have relationships with are the registrars who have a profit motive in selling more domains.
It is quite possible for a not-for-profit to become a self expanding bureaucracy especially when it is gatekeeper/distributor over a resource. That said I'd take Nominet over getting Verisign to do it. The same risks apply in a commercial setting plus the push to profit.
Now I don't know the realities of Nominet or this particular proposal but I wanted to point out that in a case like this being not-for-profit is an insufficient defence against claims it is a revenue grab.
If they wanted it to be revenue neutral, they'd simply say "Any .co.uk now gets .uk free, except where there's a conflicting .org, .me or .ac", where there'd been to be some kind of conflict resolution process (possibly as simple as oldest registered version wins).
I'm happy with Nominet's administration in general, but as far as I can see this is just about increasing revenue while making a long overdue change.
And using .com as the domain for your actual website.