The government are clueless as to what will happen to UK-registered .EU domains when we leave the European Union.
It’s the perfect case study of one of the thousands of annoying, disruptive and just pointless changes which will take place when we tear ourselves out of the EU next year.
A third of a million UK-registered website addresses will have to be re-registered – because Brits will no longer be able to use the .eu domain name.
According to a new report from the EU Scrutiny Committee:
“The UK currently has the fourth largest number of .eu registrations in the EU (340,000), which means that a significant number of organisations and individuals potentially stand to be affected….
“We note that the EU legal act governing the management of the .eu Top-Level Domain only permits persons, organisations and businesses based in the European Economic Area to register .eu domain names.
“By default, when the UK leaves the European Union, and any transition period ends, UK persons and organisations that have registered .eu domain names will no longer be legally eligible for these registrations. 340,000 UK users potentially stand to be affected by this development.”
The government’s excuse when challenged on the issue was that stakeholders haven’t raised it with them – but that’s presumably because they have ninety nine other Brexit-related nightmares to deal with.
The Committee are calling on the government to find out whether UK users who have already registered .eu domain names will have to cease to use them upon EU exit – and to prove that they have actually asked stakeholders in the tech industry about this.
Yet another Brexit nuisance for UK businesses and the tech industry…
Josiah Mortimer is Editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter.
You can read the report here.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport were not immediately available for comment.
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