What's the point?
Geez, I'm so glad there will be .uk addresses. It takes so much unnecessary effort to type in the .co before it
A host of new, short domain names will be made available under the body responsible for domain names ending in .uk, Nominet. It plans to allow the registration of previously-banned domain names consisting of one or two characters. The non-profit body also plans to allow people to register names consisting of terms that make up …
With two character domain names threre will be a VERY limited number of possible domains, they will all be snapped up almost instantly during this "sunrise" period, and most will probably never be used.
People don't have any problem remembering domain names. If they do, they just type what they want onto google.
Hello Solution, are you looking for Problem? I havn't seen him.
No icon because .... meh.
haha they should be so lucky.
You'll get about 10 thousand smart ass SEO types rushing to register all 52 of the 1 letter domains as their trademark.
You'll get people beating each other to death in the queue outside the IPO.
And with all the effort people are going to devote to getting these domains, I'll bet you a years wages not one of them ends up pointing to a website actually worth visiting.
NRS be gone! Some of us will remember the back-to-front email addresses used in UK academia.
There is a tale of someone sending an email to a computer lab address of dressedinblack@uk.ac.oxbridge.cl, and finding it routed via Chile (manually forwarded by a mail system admin).
Actually, addresses like "cbs%uk.ac.aston.kirk::stilesaj" made more sense to me. Start with the country code, then narrow it progressively down as you add more parts.
After all, with phone numbers, you dial the STD code first; and even the first few digits of the number proper usually identify a particular village or a region of a town.
There ought to be a clause added to the sale conditions of these domains that requires onward sale to be at a price no greater than that paid by the purchaser, with automatic reversion back to Nominet if they try. That would stop the inevitable speculators who will be bidding to acquire as many as they can and then offer them on at inflated prices.
Another few hundred domains parked on godaddy.
The rules about ownership of domains need to be looked at again, but it's not going to happen because the leaches that keep profiteering from the existing system are the same bastards that get to make the rules.
@Harry the Snot
No, you're not reading correctly, we're on about the third level. It isn't <something>.uk that is going open, it is <something>.co.uk or <something>.org.uk etc.
@Fuzz
Some 2 letter and even 1 letter registrationed existed BEFORE these rules - they have been allowed to continue. Nominet have detailed this on the web site.
That rule OUGHT to be applied to ALL domains.
Domains ought to be registerable only on a plausible "need to have" basis, and once that need ends the domain should revert to nominet for sale, not held as ransomware to make bogus profit for somebody who probably should never have been allowed to register the domain in the first place.
"The non-profit body"
Really? So why do they suspend domain names and charge £80 to unsuspend each one, and you still have to pay for renewal on top?
They must have champagne and oysters for lunch every day.
I try to avoid .uk domains, .com's are best always will be, no stupid Paper Certificate sent out for every registered domain. They really must be milking it if they can afford to send out these fancy, but ultimately worthless certs.