UK Businesses Caught Up In Domain Name Wrangle

by Robin Pilgrim, LawAndTax-News.com, London

27 February 2003

Many UK businesses have been stung by the seeming demise of the .uk.co domain, which has occurred partly as the result of a ruling in Columbia.

The Lawzone.co.uk news service revealed on Wednesday that: 'The uk.co system is currently down with apparently 8,000 domain names affected and no date set for the system to work again.'

The .co domain is asigned to Columbia, and the .uk.co sub-domain was reportedly issued by a Columbian university to an UK-based reseller. According to Lawzone, despite numerous warnings, many UK businesses were persuaded to register alternative domain names by telesales callers who warned them that uk.co would replace the traditional .co.uk suffix.

Addressing affected UK businesses via its website, the Columbian University in question explained that its contract with Net Registrar, the UK-based reseller, had expired on February 16 2003, after which all .uk.co domain names stopped working. It explained that:

'Since December 2002, we had offered to enter into a new arrangement with Net Registrar in order to safeguard your uk.co registrations with them for a short period of time to allow you sufficient time to transition to alternative domain names. Net Registrar failed to agree the terms of that new arrangement. This means that as a result of our agreement with Net Registrar having terminated, Net Registrar is no longer entitled to operate .uk.co sub-domains and therefore Net Registrar is not entitled to permit you to use the uk.co domain names that you had registered with them.'

The statement continued:

'A Council of State decision in Columbia dated 12 July 2002 ordered the Minister of Communications in Columbia to take over the administration of the .co top level domain names by no later than 31 December 2003. The Minister may do this at any time. We informed Net Register of this position some months ago, and as mentioned above, sought to agree a new arrangement with Net Registrar to facilitate the transition by Net Register's customers to new domain names.'

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