Fasthosts finally promises to stop pushing unwanted .uk domains onto irritated customers

UK domain registrar Fasthosts has finally promised to stop pushing unwanted .uk domains onto its customers, six years after the scheme was first launched. In an email to long-suffering registrants this week, the registrar attempted to make light of its years of emails on the .uk equivalent to their .co.uk internet addresses by …

[Anonymous Coward]

From the 7th of September we won’t email you ever again about making it yours

Would you care for a text message with a link instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: From the 7th of September we won’t email you ever again about making it yours

Talkie Toaster: How about a muffin?

[TeeCee]

...no choice but to let the potentially valuable domains go.

If the only person or organisation that might want each of them doesn't, despite repeated attempts to flog the sodding things to them, I reckon that "worthless" is more accurate than "potentially valuable".

[cipnt]

One man's trash is another man's treasure

[John Brown (no body)]

trash.co.uk or trash.uk? Or do you want both, with a helping of treasure.uk?

[vogon00]

I'm all for market/business development, however I wish people would at least acknowledge that the best way to sell a product or service is to offer something that your target market actually wants or needs (Not the same thing!).

Innovation is the life-blood of the global marketplace ('Innovate or die') but, just like evolution, that comes with risks. You cannot assume that anything you offer to the marketplace will be 'wanted' or 'needed' i.e. you might think it's the best thing since pre-sliced bread, but it's not necessarily your opinion that counts.

The domain name business has been done to death already - so many entities offering the same thing with little or no differentiation between them. The answer isn't to issue yet more available domain names on the assumption that they have value. (In the standard economic model this is known as Inflation, and it actually *devalues* what's already out there). If you want to increase the value of existing stuff (In this case domain names) then make them rarer, not more common.

And don't get me started on the bullshit subscription model that is the SSL/X.509 Certificate 'Industry', or the hype around encrypting everything (Which in a lot of cases is unnecessary for us, but vital for them!) - this is just another instance of people trying to force you to generate revenue for them. Personally, I don't give a toss if my ISP processes my DNS lookups, or is able to snoop on my personal plain-text HTTP traffic... they are welcome to it as it has little or no value. That said, I still (hypocritically?) ensure that anything work-related transferred across the public internet is encrypted, and at least enough to make it so awkward for people to intercept that they'll move on to the lower hanging fruit.