According to the Mail on Sunday, UK Government have privately approved a plan to allow Scottish websites to end with .scot instead of .uk. Plans to let Wales go it alone with ‘.wales’ and ‘.cymru’ have also been approved.
However the UK Government has refused to allow the devolved administrations in Holyrood and Cardiff to use the domain name .gov.scot or .gov.cymru and are insisting that these bodies retain the existing .gov.uk. The Mail on Sunday reports that UK government ministers is refusing to permit the use of the domain .gov.scot for fear of giving a boost to the independence campaign.
English Conservative MP Andrew Percy, who was recently in the news as one of the MPs who were assaulted by Falkirk Labour MP Eric Joyce, reacted angrily to the announcement, saying that it was “nonsense”. Mr Percy claimed that the UK government had “caved in” to the SNP on the issue.
Mr Percy said: “Scotland hasn’t even voted yet on whether to go independent and all this is doing is giving First Minister Alex Salmond’s Nationalists a huge propaganda coup.”
There has been a long campaign in Scotland for the creation of a top level internet domain for the country.
First Minister Alex Salmond has given his backing to the plan, saying: “The time is ripe for the worldwide family of Scots to have their own domain, reflecting an online community defined by a shared commitment to Scottish identity, culture and economic promotion.”
Excellent news, but a bit churlish on the .gov.scot issue. To be expected I suppose.
It’s one more thing in place come the great day.
I may even register a domain name for the first time.
I agree with your remark “a bit churlish”, #truth. It’s just a continuation of the small-mindedness of Blair and his Westminster cohorts, when they insisted the Scottish Parliament had to use the term “Presiding Officer” instead of “Speaker” (unlike the Stormont Assembly!), in order to reinforce Blair’s petty opinion that it would be nothing more than a “glorified parish council”!
For the same petty reason, Westminster insisted in the early years that our Holyrood parliament had to be called the Executive (still used by Foulkes, Forsyth and Wallace) rather than Government. Dewar, McLeish and McConnell all supinely complied, and it took oor Alex to ignore this Westminster petty-mindedness. I hope he does the same with this latest attempted put-down. Just another example of the superiority complex of the unionist mindset in Westminster.
In fact, in all the major wars and battles the French and English fought, there was a Scottish contingent fighting for the French.
Aye, and us lot were mercenaries for both sides!
*Sigh*
As soon as someone stumps up $185,000 to register .scot as a geoTLD, has that registration accepted by ICANN and then offers the lower-level domains for sale.
dotscot.net/
That’s why we now have a government in Scotland rather than a “Nay-saying” bunch of British Defence League losers in Whitehall who would much rather fight for a Home counties domain than a Scottish one.