CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME HOW TO REGISTER AFTER REGISTRATION MAKING CHANGES TO YOUR DOMAIN NAME
Initial Comments on Rules
- LTD and PLC
- Change Clause 2.2 to Allow plc's to register .ltd domain names. A plc is a public limited company. PLC's by their nature tend to purchase all variants of their domain name and should be able to purchase a .ltd since they are limited. (Some have already done this and it may as well be accepted in the rules)
Limited companies are not PLC's and so should not be able to purchase a plc domain name since they would be pretending to be a plc which is a criminal offence.
- Summary remove exclusion from registration of any companies that do not pass 3.6 (characters in company name that are not allowed in a domain name).
Clause 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 of specific rules for .plc and .ltd
These are quite complex and open to interpretation. e.g. the @ symbol is now common in company names and the current interpretation is that it is punctuation and dropped. This is supported by companies house decisions that '@xyx' company is too like 'xyz' company and the earlier registered company takes precedence.
3.4 (Punctuation marks are dropped) 3.5 (Accents are dropped) 3.6 if there are any other invalid characters for domain names then the domain can not be registered.
Proposed new rule.
3.6 If at this point the name contains any character not permitted by the Rules these characters shall be removed.
This would cover Company Names such as ~ Computers of # Computers (both ~ and # are dropped by Companies House) but not explicitly covered in 3.4 and could result in a client being denied a name.
In any case there is the 3.12 first come first served rule and two domain name spaces plc and ltd which by definition must be half empty.
- Removal of company type from domain name
Should only apply to companies that have names over 2 letters. Companies with names under 2 letters can keep the company type as part of their name to achieve a longer domain name. This would not result in duplicates since these words are not allowed in company names apart from at the end.
- Change Clause 2.2 to Allow plc's to register .ltd domain names. A plc is a public limited company. PLC's by their nature tend to purchase all variants of their domain name and should be able to purchase a .ltd since they are limited. (Some have already done this and it may as well be accepted in the rules)
- .net rules
2.3.1 the first part try's to set out all the common forms of business and states and ISP must be one of these. This excludes a number of types of organisations from being an ISP e.g a Trade Union, a Club, a co-operative.
A farer way of drafting this would any business or organisation such as list of types or removing this altogether and just having the qualification of being a member of ripe/equivalent or having an AS number.
- Restricted Domain Name spaces
.net, .ltd and .plc are tightly controlled domain name spaces. There are a number of 1, 2 character domain names in .co.uk and there is no technical reason why a body that qualifies under the rules of these spaces should not be allowed shorter domain names. The register of companies has been running for over 100 years and virtually all short common names have been registered so there would not be the massive land grab that would occur if 1/2 character names were allowed under .co.uk
Ripe might get a bit more funding as people joined to get an a.net.uk if they wished it.
Regards
Ronald Duncan
ronald.duncan@ukplc.net
http://www.ukplc.net
+44 (0) Tel 0118 963 7000 Mobile 07973 754 817 Fax 0118 963 7350
@UK PLC, 5 Jupiter House, Calleva Park, Reading, RG7 8NN, England
