A look at Alexa and .org.uk sites

[namealot]

fxpro / hotmail would be the best poster boys for 'no' to .uk - push the security angle of domains like that falling into the wrong hands.

Though that angle goes away if they take the .org.uk's via legal action right now. I certainly wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of legal action from either...

Why on earth would they even be bothered about having the "uk" sure for free but no ones ever going to do anything with them other than hope they buy them or don’t stick them in legal shit pile...

 

[Systreg]

That last paragraph is nonsense - I've openly being suggesting things which wouldn't benefit me the most.

That's just my view, you or anyone else may think differently, it's just how it comes across to me, I've also seen you make some valid points in other topics, so it's not all bad

Plus I suspect that domain is way less valuable than you think it is. If any of the big players would want it, why didn't they buy the .co.uk already? Its been parked/unused for years. Then look at the recent payday cleanup... no affiliates ranking that aren't massive brands already. So if you can't rank a domain and you can't sell it... what do you do with it?

Which site is less valuable than I think, paydayloans.co.uk? I wasn't sure you were talking about that domain as you mention it being parked, but it has a site on it when I looked, or is it a new site and was parked recently?. I'm sure some big players have inquired about the .co.uk along the way, maybe they're asking too much for it or didn't want to sell at the time, who knows.

The .UK would be different proposition, and it's not all about ranking in search engines. It would only cost £10 to whoever got the .UK, and if that person had the required funds available, or if they found a funding partner for a JV, I'm sure they could brand it nicely and throw loads of money in to advertising on the internet, TV, newspapers etc, the potential rewards could be very big for a small initial investment for the domain, rather than possibly paying out £xxx,xxx or whatever in the first place for a domain only.

Yes, I've seen the clean up that Google have done in that niche, and long overdue it was too, they should never have let it get like that in the first place, and had known about it for ages, but did nothing about it until the other week.

fxpro / hotmail would be the best poster boys for 'no' to .uk - push the security angle of domains like that falling into the wrong hands.

Though that angle goes away if they take the .org.uk's via legal action right now. I certainly wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of legal action from either...

Indeed, and it's not just household TM names like you mention above which will be very vulnerable to fraud/phishing, there will be many more just like those, and not only that, any business using a .co.uk domain could find themselves on the wrong end of fraudulent activity if someone registers the .UK if the legit company doesn't.

I have email set up on one of my .co.uk domains and I get regular emails meant for the org.uk of my domain, I would get even more if it was the .UK

As an example, say I ran a business and my site is mybluewidgets.co.uk, a fraudster registers mybluewidgets.uk, they set up a catch all email address and/or the same info@ email address that I use on my mybluewidgets.co.uk site, it is guaranteed that a number of people will email the fraudsters instead of me by mistake.

The fraudster is now getting emails meant for my business, some of which could contain valuable information regarding payments to my company, or information that could be used for id theft, the fraudster replies to my clients pretending to be me, and changes the payment information to get the payment sent from the customer to them.

You also have fake sites that fraudsters set up, I used to be involved in killing them, these included fully cloned versions of real banks, including fake accounts in the fake bank site which looks just like the real thing, and the fraudsters would add large amounts on to those account pages. They persuade their victims that the amount is in their new account, and of course there would advance fee payments required to access the fund, or get it transferred, then there would be demurrage charges, and another charge, and another, classic advance fee fraud.

Having seen inside a lot of the fake bank sites, and taken the details of the victims, who were all contacted, many had lost a lot of money, some of the fake sites had victims running in to the hundreds or people, and they were handing over serious amounts of money to the fraudsters.

This is something I have seen happen many times during my years of actively fighting internet fraud, sometimes it was just a fraudster piggybacking on the name of a real company, other times they woul spoof emails to looklike they were from a real company in order to scam people, but it was mostly done by fraudsters using Yahoo, Hotmail or any number of other free email addresses, people are very gullible and many are wide open to social engineering. So, imagine the customer emailing the wrong email/site on a .UK instead of the .co.uk, or the other way round, people and companies could find themselves in all sorts of trouble.

You can see the whole database of fake sites here, many new sites added daily, from fake banks, to couriers, to escrow sites etc, note that if you look 4 pages deep in the search, those are just the new fake sites added on July 7th:

db.aa419.org/fakebankslist.php

[edit]

Just to add, there are 76,723 fake sites listed in the database, of those, 6648 are on .co.uk domains

[end edit]

Years ago the fake sites used to get taken down by many of us running a vampire tool (I still have my copy) which would drain their bandwidth and take them off line, now it's done through completing a large form with many sections detailing why the site is fake. Such as a link to real bank site, fake postal address listed on the site, evidence of the same address/phone numbers being used on previous known fake sites that have been closed down, the evidence list goes on at length. That gets emailed to their webhosts, many of whom are have already given the bank killers a contact at their webhosts in order to get the sites closed straight away, other emails get sent to law enforcement, again, there are contacts in that area also, some of the bank killers are actual police officers in real life, but also dedicate their free time to helping to prevent 419 fraud.

 

[Skinner]

What a load of old monkey, lots of people make a point of selling to the fabled "end user" which are more often than not recent catches and punts to these "little idiot business" owners as you call them.

Bear in mind most of these little businesses will be the only registrant - they'll get the domain by default (assuming they know about it / aren't an idiot).

 

[Stephen]

£25,000,000 p.a.

You'd be very very surprised if they went with a proposal that they've already put out? Clearly that is the number 1 option on the table currently from Nominets view. My only real surprise is that they didn't push for anything involving auctions, which would have been a real nice earner for them.....

I found that odd when I first read the detail of the V2.0 proposal.

Yet I have come to realize that in Version 1, lots of the £20 would have gone in costs of Malware and address verification (partly as they didn't think it through), legal fees etc. So the auction money would have been the prize.

In Version 2, no auction but when you look at another 5,000,000 domains at £5 pa that is £25,000,000 a year, every year, with little change in the Nominet cost base.

There will eventually be a drop in renewals in .org.uk and .me.uk and revenues from them.

They have mentioned about discount but have not been specific, they have asked for comments but as the domain would not be co-terminus it would be too expensive too maintain. So best to look like you tried, say sorry andgive it to charity.

I wonder what that does to the Nominet annual bonus pot for the next 10 years, and yes that's every one of those 10 years.