Welsh factions clash over .cymru and .wales bids A grassroots move to create .cymru as a new top-level internet domain has hit a roadblock after the Welsh government backed a .wales bid managed by an English company. Oxford-based Nominet, which runs the .uk registry, has been mulling a new Welsh extension for the last few months, according to director of finance Glenn …
Simple solution ... register both and require that
1) anyone registering a .wales domain must also register the equivalent .cymru domain
2) the .wales domain should contain all the site info in english
3) the .cymru domain must either (a) contain the same info as the .wales site but in welsh or (b) contain the message "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu." on every page in place of the English text
I don't really mind whether it is ".cymru" or ".wales", but the argument that ".wales" is better for business is suspect. What he is saying is that there is no value in "cymru" as an identity for the country that he professes to care about. I think most Welsh people would disagree with that.
Regardless of the name, it seems to me that Carwyn Jones doesn't really see the Welsh Assembly as a government - just a local administration. Saying that it would cost too much to manage the TLD within Wales is bollocks - the boost to Welsh business from acting as if we really do care about running ourselves would be far greater than this.
Perhaps things will change when we have the sense to elect something other than 'The Labour party in Wales' to run the show.
If they were smart, they would have agreed to .cym
Why? Because think of all the fun that you could have with microsoft.cym, apple.cym, etc. I'm sure that there would be more than a few people that make a mistake typing .com
Plus how much money would they have raised by the companies snapping up their brand names to make sure that cyber squatters don't grab them. Could have made a fortune
"Compounding dotCYM's frustration, First Minister Carwyn Jones has publicly indicated that he prefers ".wales" to ".cymru", in order to appeal to businesses internationally."
yeah, because even more people know where Cymru is than Wales. most foreigners i meet seem to think wales is a county in england...
Why does Japan use the .jp domain instead of .nip? or China use .cn instead of, what, .zho?
Yes, why have something international when you can give your small region an extension less deciperable than an airport code, which even some of your compatriots might not recognise? .alba anyone? .kern?
.uk is not the English TLD!
Why won't people accept that?
If we get .scot and .wales/.cymru, then we should get a .england
Not .london to cover the whole country.
It's only fair that if two parts of the United Kingdom can have a seperate online identity then we should get one as well, and I'm sure NI would want one as well.
Vanity TLDs are just as cretinous as vanity car plates. Unfortunately they are also harmful, as they make URL guessing much harder and create even more opportunities for phishing and typosquatting sites. They will help round out the ICANN budget and allow profiteering by a few more scumbag registrars; it all amounts to an end-user tax with no public benefit.
<i>"First Minister Carwyn Jones ...prefers ".wales" to ".cymru", in order to appeal to businesses internationally"</i>
You see, that's where Germany has gone wrong, with their .de suffix. How can they possibly expect English speakers to cope with the fact that other countries call themselves *some weird name* in *another language* ? No wonder they're an economic backwater.
It's amongst the most pointless things in the known universe. Deciding who you are based on which side of an arbitrary line drawn on a map your mum gave birth. Furthermore, basing your identity on a single factor, in Wales case, a seperate language is just daft.
Well...2 factors if you count "Not English" as a factor.
You can't be proud to be Welsh as you had no say in the matter. It's like saying you're proud to have a head or you're proud to metabolise food. Same goes for proud to be English/white/black/gay/european/whatever. It's a ludicrous statement that people need to stop saying.
One of the Welsh independence arguments is that London is too far from Wales to understand...how does Berwick-upon-Tweed feel about the distance from London. In a pub in Conwy the other week a bloke was complaining that the assembly in Cardiff was too far away to understand the problems of North Wales...WTF???
I can't wait for the inevitable independence of the Welsh, just so we can see the North split from the South, then Anglesey declaring independence and so on until each house is an independent nation where people in the kitchen moan that the back bedroom is too far away to understand the problems inherent in kitchens.
Not picking on the Welsh in particular, everyone in every group is the same.
Why can't we forget all this stuff and just all get along? We all want the same thing, nice house, good health and a job that doesn't suck too much. Come on humanity, focus on our similarites not our differences.
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Yes, yes, yes, one thousand times yes! Bill Hicks was preaching it back in the 80's and it's still relevant now. Nationalism is completely pointless, and odds are you had nothing to do with anything great your "country" did in the past, so why be so irrationally proud of it?
You, sir, just won One Tinternet.
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