@elomatreb @cwebber what worries me is I can *easily* see London threatening or even doing just that as retaliation (whilst still keeping BST).

This also means I may now have to change a whole load of my email addresses for UPS alarms etc which currently use an .eu domain, as well as the one I use to sign into Mastodon..

@vfrmedia @cwebber Yeah, not granting a legacy usage rights to existing owners is pretty shitty IMO (Incidentally I didn't even know .eu had eligibility restrictions)

@elomatreb @cwebber I remember reading about this when I first registered mine, it wasn't expected the UK would leave the EU then!

Hopefully an agreement is reached in the transition talks rather than cause major disruption, or possibly the hosting companies offer to manage them on behalf of UK customers if thats allowed, but that is also an opportunity for lockin and extracting extra fees (and yet you can still register a Soviet domain!)

@vfrmedia Arrangements like that are common for TLDs with strict residency requirements, but they usually require notarial services which gets really pricey (and one of the selling points of .eu was its low price compared to most other EU-ccTLDs other than .de)

@varx @cwebber to be fair the 17 million folk in UK who put the middle finger (or perhaps more precisely the V-sign) at the other half of the voting population are just as much to blame.

It is made fairly clear in the .eu registration commisions any domain owner has to be based in the EU (other countries have even more restrictive rules about domain ownership or even getting VOIP phone numbers)

Leaving the EU has consequences, not all of which are positive..

@vfrmedia @cwebber There's precedent for not getting rid of domains that would no longer be registrable by their owners. I guess the Soviet Union example *is* a bit different, though, in that there's an extant registration authority who can make whatever policy decisions they want...

@varx @cwebber also the wider point about DNS is important too, especially with global trends towards nationalism/populism.

It unnerves me someitmes when I see young startup companies/indieweb sites with mildly edgy/controversial content pick "cool" domains which belong to countries which are moving to more conservative/nationalist politics, even if registrars currently say "business is business" and hold their noses, its not guaranteed that they will continually do so..

@vfrmedia @cwebber Tell me about it. I keep waiting for Libya to take over bit.ly or something.

I'm hosting a sandstorm instance at sandy.parsni.ps but I mean really who knows what Palestine may or may not decide to care about in N years.

@varx @vfrmedia It's not anything specific about countries though, if you get a TLD operated by a "regular" commercial entity (i.e. gtlds) you're at their mercy just as much (in fact many industry-related TLDs place just as strict registration requirements as those strict ccTLDs).

The only true solutions would be completely new systems like namecoin, but those bring their own set of problems with them

@elomatreb @varx

true, I'm equally wary about these "new/cool" domains - not so much of fear of censorship but there was at least one where whatever agreements made it work with DNS fell over and it took several days to resolve with everyone involved blaming one another (I forget the exact domain but there were several toots to an article about it and one big service affected had to add a traditional .com as a backup..)

@elomatreb @vfrmedia @varx ... problems like a totally pointless blockchain. :) Decentralized DNS was tried and failed long before namecoin.

@tw @varx @vfrmedia Indeed, although I was more thinking about the concept in general, which still has the problem that not all moderation/control is evil censorship