The EU was spiteful in this case, but that was expected. To be fair, they gave British registrants at least 1 year of grace period to migrate their domains to a new TLD, it didn’t happen overnight in this case.
A year's grace was pretty generous, and has the domains been transferred to an EEA-based entity (such as a subsidiary based in the EEA or an EEA-based proxy, which is a service some .EU registrars provide), then they could keep them.
If it's not actively "spiteful" to impair stability, when the only cost is an ever-so-modest impact to brand purity, then at the very least it's a short-sighted way to cause a deadweight economic loss to humanity.
I guess that's just what rule-by-bureaucracy does, though, including EU bureaucracy: every day, they make decisions that affect people, always bringing the greatest possible reverence for the rules, and paying as little regard as possible to the price of the consequences of their decisions, which are fundamentally someone else's problem.
Amazing how you would think that your particular field of work would be excepted.
I guess the point is that one should only go with commercial domain names, and never with political ones (which all country code TLDs are by definition).
The nature of democracy is that you don't always get your way.
Barnier kept the door open for all kinds of intermediate levels of association, but the British delegation kept saying no and pushing for hard Brexit. Well, that's what they got.
a couple of opinionated words there that you didn't support.
drastic for sure is false as it took quite awhile to go through, much longer than the merger in fact.
For my opinionated sentence I will say... Britain is better off, the EU is an abomination.
The definition of 'drastic' does not necessarily mean quick (although it can). Definitions of drastic include (collected variously from Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries): 'having very noticeable effects', 'likely to have a strong or far-reaching effect', and 'extreme in effect [...]'.
I think Brexit fits this definition.
With regards to your opinionated sentence, you are entitled to your opinion that the EU is an 'abomination', although it is just an opinion without any support, and it's provably incorrect that Britain 'IS' better off (although an argument can be made that the potential long term benefits of Brexit may outweigh the current short term negative impact, it's far from being certain, and definitely should not be discussed in the present tense).
The UK government fucked everyone over with Brexit, largely because they didn't care to think about the consequences.
Yes! A visa! Thank you! The strident heart and soul of the inhuman, inhumane, soulless bureaucracy. It is exactly like that.
This isn't exactly something to be lauded or celebrated! Have you ever dealt with having a visa? Have you ever been impacted by the uncertainty and confusion of the nation you are living in, changing its rules about your visa? Do you have any concept at all of the economic and the humanitarian impact of the bureaucracy's machinations around and involving visas? Even aside from the worst of that, have you ever abandoned a job and friends and the life you were trying to build somewhere, because someone changed the rules about visas? I liked that job, sir.
Oh, let me tell you about visas! I will tell you about them all day long. But, ah — I think it was a more flattering to the decision-makers when we were just talking about the cost of broken URLs and email addresses.
And then yes, like visa recognition agreements, if your country withdraws from a visa accord or economic region, the host country has no obligation to keep you credentialed, or domained. If unhappy about such thing, a more effective path is to activate compatriots against the withdrawal, rather than fuss at the host zone.
My friend, if these systems were just about aligning the incentives for workers and benefits and taxes, and otherwise tried to be understanding about human foibles, then people wouldn't point to immigration systems around the world as a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Just to pick an example — chosen for my familiarity, wholly outside of and unrelated to Brexit — the UK's Windrush scandal involved the bureaucracy actively destroying old records of immigration from British overseas possessions (particularly the Caribbean), then deciding years later to go after people who had been living in the country for decades — demanding they supply exhaustive documentation of their legal immigration, and their life and activities in the intervening time. Rest assured that this was a fully adversarial process! They did not offer to help anyone so affected gather these documents, or to make their case.
And later, in another unrelated scandal, the Home Office decided to react to an English-examination cheating scandal by analyzing everyone's examination results with some opaque computerized process, using the results to declare something like 97% of them as invalid cheaters — and sending nastygrams to about 9,700 university students, calling them dirty cheaters and demanding they leave country. Many of them did, and they forcibly removed others. Notably, they did not ask for them to re-sit the exam. They did not care about the lives ruined.
Of course the matter of the .eu domain is absolutely nothing compared to the daily nightmare that is "visas," but the same devotion to rules and insensitivity to the costs of policy runs through the matter. They could have grandfathered in existing domains, at least a little bit longer. I know that if I had a website and I had to move domains, I would want to run web and email forwarding for more than one year. If they wanted to be particular about just having the forwarding, they could have audited the sites to make sure that they were just redirects, and charged for the privilege. They didn't. There's no sane reason that couldn't happen except to preserve The Rules — but these rules simply are not a valuable end in and of themselves, despite the laud and honor they have received in this thread.
Funny how applying the eligibility the rules to you as they do to everyone else in the world who is not a member of the EU is seen as spiteful by you.
So I wish you all the best of luck as your continent, now deprived of the economic impulse of cheap Russian gas, discovers the true weight of its overbearing and inflexible regulatory state, and deindustrializes with a scale and speed never seen before in human history (already ArcelorMittal is importing iron from the US rust belt, of all places!!!). And I'm actually, legitimately, genuinely sorry for everything the populist backlash is going to do as things fall apart, because I expect it to be very ugly.
Visas are an imperfect tool for whatever they are designed to do, and any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy will develop ways to misuse such a gift.
They are a complete mess, especially so from the EU countries. US and UK have been more reasonable (no hard requirements of what documentation is needed, as long as you can prove that you are travelling with an actual purpose, and once granted, it's for at least 6 months for UK or 3 years in case of the US), but luckily we've entered the Schengen whitelist since.
Ah yes. Because the UK isn't planning on sending refugees in Rwanda. /s
You're expecting the UK to be treated specially.
That logic defies description. If you are not a member of a certain country or economic zone, you cannot get and keep that zone's exclusive domains. Thats law. What you are saying is that the Eu should have made an exception for the Brits and allowed them to keep doing what others are not allowed. That sounds like too much exceptionalist entitlement.
In 2010, nearly 10% of the revenue of the Government of Tuvalu came from royalties from .tv addresses.
> You may register a .eu, .ею or .ευ domain name if you fulfil the following criteria:
> You represent an organisation established in one of the European Union Member States; or Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway. You are an individual residing in one of the European Union Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway, or a citizen of one of the European Union Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway (as of 2 August 2021).
There's nothing which requires the EU to impose that law, but it is law nevertheless.
It would be different if the parent had written "If you are not a member of the EU. . ." but that was not what was written.
Likewise, an EU law that governs only EU assets isn't transnational. For example, Poland doesn't have eligibility criteria [0] but French ccTLDs like .pm do [1]. As I read the restriction text I detect a touch of the spite referred to elsewhere as it has exceptions for other non-EU-member European countries: "Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein"
I don't know how useful that is in practise, but it's not the only CCTLD with this restriction.
The UK helped to implement the following regulations on who can register for a .eu TLD at that time:
(i) undertaking having its registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the Community, or
(ii) organisation established within the Community without prejudice to the application of national law, or
(iii) natural person resident within the Community;
(Regulation (EC) No 733/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council, Article 4 (2) (b))
There were some amendments in 2019, but the meaning is broadly the same as the original draft (at least in this context). The key relevant change is the addition an entitlement for EU citizens who are not resident in the EU (e.g.: those who live in the UK).