Scotland seeks its own domain name extension
We’ve been chatting about an interesting story in the office this morning: the Scottish National Party wants to establish a top level domain (TLD) for Scotland. The story has been covered by the Times and over on Circle ID.
The proposal is being driven by dotSCO (surely they’ve missed a trick by not going for the snappier ‘dotSCOT’?), an organisation which seems to have been around since at least 2005, judging by this news story. They hit the headlines over the weekend because the Scottish National Party, led by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, has lent its support to the campaign.
According to the report in the Times, Alex Salmond is set to ”lodge a formal request with the American-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for allocating all internet domain names.”
And why not? As the dotSCO website explains:
“…the Scots language and culture is a community that we believe should be identified with its own domain on the internet. Under a .SCO domain those organisations, companies and people that express themselves in the Scots language and/or wish to encourage Scots culture will be able to be registered and will be clearly identifiable.”
What do you think? Do you support the campaign? Is creating more domain extensions is a good idea, or will it simply lead to more confusion among average internet users? Leave a comment and let us know.
If you do support the campaign, don’t forget to sign the petition calling for Scottish Government to give full support to the dotSCO application to ICANN.
(You can also find out about a similar campaign for a .cym extension over at http://www.dotcym.org/.)
On March 31st, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Maybe we should have a .en or .eng domain for England too.
On March 31st, 2008 at 9:51 pm
This is quite a funny one,
In my opinion scotland should not be allocated a new domain.
The dotUK is for the United Kingdom which is four countires.
If scotland have one then there should also be a dotENG and a dotWAL for England and Wales
On April 8th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I think people will always recognise the UK over it’s individual countries. So for me, I’m not sure how beneficial this would be. For instance, how many people in the world realise Ireland is two countries? From experience, only a small percentage.
In saying that, I can imagine a host of interesting domains cropping up with the new extensions.