At the Eisteddfod new Heritage minister Alun Ffred Jones announced that the One Wales Government were earmarking £20,000 to support the DotCym campaign. this is a campaign to give Wales it's own domain instead of having to use the British .co.uk. Catalonia has recently succeeded with such a bid and .cat is now proving popular.
While some will surely argue that the Assembly is blowing our cash away on a worthless job I personally support the campaign for a Welsh domain. I am just a teeny bit concerned about the choice of preferred domain though - .cym. Once the historically most enterprising entrepreneurs on the Internet find out how .cym is pronounced we might find that the battle to register certain website names with the new domain becomes a little too fierce!
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"Once the historically most enterprising entrepreneurs on the Internet find out how .cym is pronounced we might find that the battle to register certain website names with the new domain becomes a little too fierce!"
erm, no. The .cym domain (unlike .com for instance) will be a sponsored Top Level Domain. This means the owners of domains which buy .cym will have to confirm to the criteria laid down for ownership. If these criteria aren't met then they won't get to use the .cym domain.
The dotCYM bid follows the successful .cat domain. This has been a very successful domain which has managed to avoid problems created by defensive registration (companies buying new TLD to avoid some idiot taking their brand) and has virtually no problems with disingenious users. The 'fear' stoked up by some at the time was that .cat would attract cat lovers. Because .cat is also a sTLD any websites for cats which had nothing to do with the Catalan linguistic and cultural community couldn't by the domain.
There are going to be new TLDs over the next few years to accommodate the increase use of the web. In this climate, it makes sense that there is one domain for a legitimate community - a domain which is also increasingly seen as part of the new climate of promoting linguistic access and diversity online (as espouses by UNESCO) and also which will be easier to manage and so help reduce e-crime?
I could also mention that there are quite a few words in English which have different meanings and connotations in Welsh. But then, I'm not a 13 year old any more.
Wow, some people take jokes far too seriously!
Thanks for the info though, as I said in the original post I support the campaign (and am listed as a supporter somewhere or other, just not under this name).
And how do you know I'm NOT still 13 years old!
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