On 13 Feb 2021 at 18:34:32 GMT, "Tim Lamb"
wrote:

In message , Mike Humphrey
writes
On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 10:53:26 +0000, Roger Hayter wrote:
On 13 Feb 2021 at 10:04:44 GMT, "charles"
wrote:
In article , Brian Gaff \(Sofa\)
wrote:
In what sense don't they like it? I've never had any trouble creating
accounts, more of an issue is the zip code if you need to put in a
partial address as many do not understand post codes. Brian

I've had that too. Simply - not an accepted email address

Maybe the experts can tell us if it was an actual rule change that led
to domain names of the general form of name.uk as opposed to name.co.uk
becoming available? It sounds as though they gilded the lily a bit on
email credibility checking and are excluding forms that are now
permitted. Or were they always wrong about what was allowed? I seem to
remember name.tv being permitted for a long time. If they had rules
about every .xx top level domain individually they would need to be
revising them rather often.

Each country code has rules set by the country it's assigned to. So the
rules for .tv are set by Tuvalu. Which does mean that there are at least
200 or so sets of rules (there are some ccTLDs like .eu and .scot that
aren't assigned to countries by the usual definition). Some countries
just have the end domains straight under the country code, some have
another level in between. And the second levels have rules too - the rule
for .co.uk is pretty much "pay for it", while .ac.uk has very strict
rules about about what kind of organisation qualifies.

The UK now has a mixed system. Originally there had to be a second level
- .co.uk, .org.uk, ac.uk and .gov.uk being the main ones - though some
second levels were assigned to a single organisation such as bl.uk
(British Library) and parliament.uk. The second level domains have
changed a few times - .me.uk was added not so long back as there wasn't
really anywhere for personal domains (most people were using .org.uk
or .co.uk). Recently the rules were changed to allow registering domains
directly under .uk - though the second level ones haven't gone anywhere.

There's really no way to validate if a domain name is valid (other than
by looking it up to see if it exists), beyond that it contains at least
two elements and that the last one has at least two letters. Recently
there's been a whole pile of top level domains created - some of which
it's far from clear what they're supposed to be for. So while you can
reject something like "abc@qwerty" or ", there's no way to
tell if " is valid or not - even if ".nonsense"
doesn't exist or has a rule that there must be a second level, that could
change tomorrow.

For reasons best known to Namesco, I have .uk.com The benefit seems
to be they can charge more!

That of course is because a commercial organisation managed to register uk.com
with the .com authorities and now rents out subdomains. So .uk.com is not
actually a uk domain at all, but looks like one.


--
Roger Hayter