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Comment by nicky0 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'm a citizen of the UK and I voted in the referendum to stay in the EU.

The EU could have agreed to change its TLD ownershipo rules rules (which they actually have done recently, so the rules are not set in stone) to introduce a grandfathering-in provision if they had wanted to. Close it for new registrations but allow existing resistratnts to continue to renew.

But it seems they chose to be dicks about it, perhaps to spite the UK I guess. Maybe to send a warning to other truculent EU countries. I can't say I understand their reasoning. Perhaps just petty bureaucracy at work.

But now that the precedent is set, other EU citizens should be very wary of using .eu domains. There's no guarantee that your country will remain in the EU forever either.

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I don't think it's fair to expect the EU to bend over backwards to accommodate the defectors after how they behaved. The UK knew what would happen and they choose that path anyway throwing a large number of UK citizens under the bus. It's unfortunate that they made that choice, but it's not the fault of the EU and it's not the EU's responsibility.

It also seems a bit unfair to suggest that .eu domains aren't dependable as if the same thing could happen without warning to any member country considering that the precedent established is that it would only happen to countries that insist on it happening to them.

>The UK knew what would happen and they choose that path anyway throwing a large number of UK citizens under the bus.

The politicians definitely all know it wouid be a disaster - Gove and Johnson's faces on the day of the result look like they're at a funeral.

The public, however, insisted that "we knew what we was voting for", verbally abusing anyone who asked them what that actually was, and now are claiming that "this isn't what we voted for". Well, it was, and you were told so. Let me play the world's smallest violin in sympathy.

> The public

51.8% of the voting public

In addition: after the referendum, the EU offered all kinds of options to make it a soft Brexit, but those same politicians drew unnecessarily strong red lines (and are still doing so regarding Northern Ireland) in order to appease a tiny extremist minority in their party. There's only so much the EU can do. Decisions have consequences, and I can't blame the EU for being a bit too strict now and then in response to that kind of game-playing and plain incompetence.

> But it seems they chose to be dicks about it, perhaps to spite the UK I guess. Maybe to send a warning to other truculent EU countries.

Well, of course the EU chose to be dicks about it - the various UK governments did all their best to ensure an as-chaotic-as-possible Brexit, constantly derailing discussions, even risking setting the Northern Ireland civil war alight again and demand that the EU concede to prevent that.

It was dumb enough that Brexit happened in the first place (some say, the vote was close enough that Russian propaganda made the key difference), but the way that Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and now Sunak have handled Brexit made an already bad situation even worse. Had they shown even the slightest bit of respect and solution-oriented thinking towards the EU, the EU negotiators would have been far more interested in solutions that don't mess up stuff too much.

Yes but… Some current EU states have not exactly covered themselves in glory whilst their elected governments have rode roughshod over some of the EU’s most fundamental principles, and what sanctions have their citizens faced?

I’m not proud of the UK when it comes to Brexit, but I can’t take the whole ‘follow the rules of the club / stay in it to enjoy the benefits’ seriously anymore.

I assume you're referring to pre-Tusk Poland and Hungary? If yes, I agree with you... the key problem is that the EU has been founded on the implicit assumption that its members would follow the law and if they wouldn't they would at least follow the courts. That held up for a long time, and then populism took over, but by the time that was realized there were too many countries in the EU to ever get consensus to truly fix this issue.

American politics suffer from the same issue IMHO, their system can't cope with the Republicans being willfully obstructionist for decades now.

Indeed - and so this explains why I roll my eyes at silly comments along the lines as 'they [Brits] voted for it, let them stand in a queue at the airport or lose their .eu domains'.

It would seem to be more equitable to me a least (someone who voted remain and lives in the EU) if the ballot had presented the options of "Remain" or "Remain and ignore all of the rules". But I don't think that would be particularly popular with the rest of the EU populace, and yet, effectively, it's what's happening.

> Indeed - and so this explains why I roll my eyes at silly comments along the lines as 'they [Brits] voted for it, let them stand in a queue at the airport or lose their .eu domains'.

For me, the most sad thing to see was that despite all of these issues and the utterly insane blunders of the last years that weren't even related to Brexit or Covid, the Tories are still in charge...

I have a slightly controversial opinion on this in that I apportion quite a lot of the blame onto Labour at the time too - pre Johnson (i.e. the Corbyn years) what effective opposition was there? Why did they then perform so utterly poorly in the election? It’s one thing to be popular with a vocal segment of enthusiasts, but unfortunately they only count votes.

And yes, first past the post and all that, but there was still an incredibly clear swing on the popular vote (-8%) away from them.

Well we haven't actually had an election since 2019

Doing that for spite is a very short-sighted thing indeed.

I think Hanlon's razor offers a better explanation

it was spite: the EU Commission explicitly said it wanted those domains cancelled and that the rules would not be changed

Funny enough Hanlon's razor still applies because in this case the stupidity lies in the counterproductive use of malice.

Why counterproductive? It has become remarkably quiet on the front of countries making plans to leave the EU.

Insightful remark, nevertheless.

There was spite involved, and for good reason.

> Well, I'm a citizen of the UK and I voted in the referendum to stay in the EU.

Welcome to democracy.

As an EU citizen, I am against allowing leaving countries to keep their priviledges. Either in or out. But this kind of whining from the no-brexit fraction is really pathetic.

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