Notice to stakeholders: withdrawal of the UK and EU rules on .eu domain names
ec.europa.eu
ec.europa.eu
Putting aside the politics, this seems like a very poor decision. Historically, I believe most registering authorities have made great efforts to grandfather-in prior domains, for practical reasons apparent to most visitors of this site.
Additionally, shoddy treatment of 10% of current registrees will do nothing to increase the perceived value of an .eu domain. I also note that it appears the EU commission didn't even discuss the policy with the company that manages the .eu domain:
https://eurid.eu/en/news/ec-releases-communication-concernin...
It does for me. Creates the image of an exclusive TLD with only genuine, trustable EU registrees.
I'm aware of several TLDs that require evidence of residency/trade within the geographic region for the purpose of registration, but I don't think any of them require it in perpetuity for renewals; it's this that seems problematic to me. In principle, URLs are based on a degree of immutability: saying that a domain name must change when circumstances change seems at odds with the architectural fundamentals of the web, in which case I question the value of establishing a .eu domain at all.
From section 2 of the commission's notice:
... as of the withdrawal date ... the Registry for .eu will be entitled to revoke such domain name on its own initiative and without submitting the dispute to any extrajudicial settlement of conflicts ...
.onion would be ideal, but Tor itself has been criminalised so well, that vanilla people are and would be frightened to visit them - and they might even be right, given the amount of supervision ISPs have nowadays.
.bit is not a solution, it's just another registrar in it's essence, and a rather complicated one, that needs namecoin.
Is anyone aware of a work-in-progress solution or had nobody thought about this during the re-decentralize haste?
"Notice to stakeholders: withdrawal of the United Kingdom and EU rules on .eu domain names"
I sincerely hope no-one in the UK is running a substantial business on an .EU domain; the damage of this could be significant for them.
Above from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've seen this rule commonly applied to HN submissions. To me, this title is clearly editorializing and more misleading than the original. There is no mention of "317k .eu domains" in the text. There is even no explicit mention of cancellation. What is mentioned is eligibility for renewals and new registrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu#Actual_use says that the number of apparently UK owned .eu domains was 344,584, but there's no citation for that claim.
To be honest I forgot that folks around here can get their panties in a real bunch over the titles of submissions -- and I'm not saying they're wrong, but in my mind the title is far less important than the actual meat of the issue and the discussion/debate that it (hopefully) generates here on HN. However, there are rules for the titles, and it wasn't my intention to break them. It was my mistake.
---
1: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/29/eu_dumps_300000_uko...
Submitted title was "European Commission to cancel 317k .eu domains with registrants in UK".
(The web page says "As of the withdrawal date", not today)
After Brexit people living in the UK no longer fulfill the requirements to own a .eu domain. Seems pretty straight forward to me.
I’d like the EU to let UK citizens who want to remain part of the EU do so. That would be rather fun wouldn’t it? Trolling the idiots who’ve seized control here.
most TLDs are not restricted, including most EU countries.
The rules allow EEA members that are not part of the EU , like norway, to use .eu. Given that there are so many british domains registered it seems like breaking them is the wrong approach - a simple change in the rules would do it.
In reality this announcement is likely to be politically motivated posturing on an issue which is to be agreed as part of the brexit negotiations, not something that is going to be decreed unilaterally.
https://eurid.eu/media/filer_public/76/48/7648e621-0c5d-4c09...
Must be "a natural person resident within the European Union, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein"
If the Registrant files a request for a Domain Name registration and is unable to meet, or no longer meets, the above conditions, the Registry is entitled to reject the request or to revoke the Domain Name concerned at any time in accordance with Sections 6 .4 and 8.4 of the Terms and Conditions.
(Why Liechtenstein? Not part of the EU:
"Liechtenstein is a member of the United Nations, European Free Trade Association, and the Council of Europe, and while not being a member of the European Union, the country participates in both the Schengen Area and European Economic Area. It also has a customs union and a monetary union with Switzerland")
> "is to be agreed as part of the brexit negotiations"
They need to get a bloody move on with this. There's a year left and a huge list of things in the same state of needing to be agreed.
"Bad voters ! BAD BAD BAD voters !"
"FU"
All the people defending this decision: do you seriously think a majority of Europeans would defend this decision ? Because that's the yardstick a government in a democratic nation should be measured by.
This is the very first enforcement action from the commission (they normally come from Eurid)
If that would be enough they would already offer it like they do for many other TLDs. You need more than a "contact" (i.e., address) inside the EU to register a .eu domain.
What do you mean "more than an address"?
Interestingly enough, there is no official language in either England or the UK — although other languages do have official status in other parts of the UK.
I do hope the withdrawal of the UK will lead to respective citizens of Ireland and Malta enjoying and practicing their own language more, with English being promoted to the language for international cooperation, but nowhere really spoken at home in the EU, because, well, cosmic irony I guess.
That said, it might not longer be a "procedural" language (status currently only held by English, French and German). But even then, I wouldn't bet on it. English is too ingrained at this point.
Languages are such a political thing. The whole recent (century) history of Gaeilge is a reaction to UK influence.
My bet is yes, even if Ireland and Malta were leaving the EU: everybody knows English, only a few know any other language.
The level of pain and expenses that they are and will endure is really something else.
And for what..? Go figure.
Really it's the victory of a decades-long press "fake news" campaign. For years papers and politicians alike have misreported EU directives, ECJ decisions, ECHR decisions (not even part of the EU), and UK human rights law decisions. This is the result.
The UK media have also given up on providing an accurate picture of the country outside London, and on any kind of industrial or trade news coverage that isn't entirely driven by press releases. And the 2008 crisis made life worse for a lot of people in ways the government has done nothing to address.
It's also easy to exploy people's problems to rally them against a fake common enemy, and it worked wonderfully.
I wonder who gained from this, amd why they did it. I don't think they believed their own lies..?
And it did make me laugh for a few seconds.
As for some "East Europe": for better or worse, they're part of the club. If they play by the rules, their objections must be heard. I disagree vehemently with them, but some workable compromise that nobody likes will be found, and things move on. That's politics. I don't have to like it as long as I understand the necessity.
Such as?
Or maybe they just wanted to prove the Brits right in wanting to leave.
They, in this case, being the British government performing the Brexit, not the EU enforcing the agreed-upon rules. The Brexit has consequences, be they negative or positive, that are real and can have a lot of impact on the lives of both British and EU citizens. The British government has accepted these as representatives of their voters.
After all, establishing an entity in the United Kingdom has, until now, been an equal level of 'betting' as establishing an entity anywhere else in the EU.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu
It was the responsibility of the leave campaign to study all the implications of leaving EU and explaining those to the public, I find it actually rather classy of the EU to take time to give information that should have been provided by the leave campaign leaders in the first place.
The rules of ccTLDs of member countries are completely irrelevant.
EDIT: Missed the part where "Accredited .eu Registrars will not be entitled to process any request for the registration of or for renewing registrations of .eu domain names by those [UK] undertakings, organisations and persons." Still, I bet the vast majority of domains will be transferred to some shell entity in the EU, even if it's just domain owners selling off domains they can't renew anymore.