On 13/03/2005 18:21 Richard Cole gurgled:
On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:25:03 +0000, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
Mark & Ana Jones wrote:
A neighbour of mine has a new website displayed on his van (but not on
the web!). It is a .org.uk domain rather than a .co.uk or a dot com
which is the usual practice.
I was under the impression that dot Org's were for "Organisations" -
usually non-profit making etc and not businesses. Can anyone shed any
light on my assumptions please.
Domain suffixes are intended to bring order to the Web, but unfortunately
they are not being forced. '.org' is reserved for non-profit
organisations so your assumption was correct.
Here are a few examples of discrepancies I am aware of:
http://mookitty.co.uk/ - I am pretty sure that gal is from Arkansas.
boren.nu - The guy is from Dallas, definitely not from tiny Niue.
I don't know who forces suffixes (if anyone). I think domain registrars
only want the revenue and will not go to great lengths and become stern
w.r.t. domain names.
Roy, Mark & Ana
The org.uk _should_ be as Mark & Ana suggest, but the .org is wide open
(My personal site is a .org [www.rcole.org] because the .com & .net had
already gone, although .net is supposed to be restricted to ISPs).
There are some different registration requirements with .org against
.co.uk which you will see if you do a WhoIs lookup
[http://www.samspade.org/t/].
Sadly the whole .uk namespace is a mess - it must have been "designed"
by a committee of civil servants. Nominet(?) in their infinite wisdom
decided that the .uk TLD wouldn't be available, only SLDs in it. The
reasoning being that it would allow different types of organization with
the same name to have their own domain name which would, amongst other
things, reduce the number of legal battles over who has the legal right
to a particular domain. Some companies register multiple SLDs though,
like .co.uk as well as the .ltd or .plc the own - even Nominet
themselves do this, nominet.co.uk points to nominet.org.uk
Having .plc.uk and .ltd.uk was well is a bad idea. The rules for these
two domains match those for company names so if Foobar Ltd. floats on
the Stock Market and becomes Foobar Plc. it would lose it's
foobar.ltd.uk domain automatically but become eligible for foobar.plc.uk
and, of course, there could be foobar.co.uk which could be another
(non-Ltd/Plc) company or not a company at all. And many companies don't
bother with the .ltd.uk or .plc.uk they are entitled to and just use
.co.uk
Then there's .ac.uk which is for colleges and universities, but not for
schools, and is controlled by UKERNA not Nominet whereas schools are
.sch.uk which _is_ controlled by Nominet.
The biggest problem is that the .uk namespace flies in the face of
Internet convention for ccTLDs - all of those I come into contact with
regularly just use the TLD, e.g. .de, .nl, .ca, .jp, etc. Taiwan, .tw,
possibly uses a similar system to .uk as most motherboard manufacturers
websites are .com.tw
It should have been either simply .uk or replicated the standard TLDs
under .uk so we'd just have .com.uk (instead of .ltd|plc|co.uk), .edu.uk
(instead of .ac|sch.uk), .net.uk, .org.uk, and .gov.uk (with
.nhs|mod|police etc. being sub-domains of it).
Parish
