Nominet: a website, by any other name, would be more secure?

Nominet propose to allow domain names directly under “.uk”; this is better? So Nominet – the people who own, manage and monetise the top-level .uk DNS domain – propose to allow creation of domain names directly under the UK suffix (PDF). Thus instead of inflatable-widgets.co.uk you could instead own inflatable-widgets.uk, and it is argued that this is somehow better. I would argue that in terms of the value it offers, the proposition is actually an irrelevance and potentially harmful overall. Having top-level domains like “.uk” is certainly an elegant way to distinguish local services like www.gov.uk from www.gov.au – but you can see even in the titlebar of this posting that internet users at large have adopted many diverse ways of naming themselves. For instance ComputerworldUK is www.computerworlduk.com rather than computerworld.co.uk which is something else entirely; our parent publication is at www.computerworld.com and yet from a business perspective we get along just fine.

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