Wednesday, 14 November 2012 06:24 Domain News
DomainIndex,the domain industry’s leading internet domain name benchmarking, rating and appraisal service,announced recently that it has changed .CO.UK’s rating from AA to B shortly after Nominet released a three month consultation .
You can read the press release after the jump :
"Domainindex.com, the domain industry’s leading internet domain name benchmarking, rating and appraisal service, has announced today that it has changed its rating for .co.uk from AA to B. The step has been taken after the release on October 1, 2012 of a three-month consultation by Nominet, the not-for-profit manager of the .uk infrastructure, into a scheme that would introduce .uk as a top-level domain (TLD). After getting feedback from Nominet meetings held in London on Nov.7and 9 Domainindex.com decided to change the .uk rating
Currently, over ten million UK domains are structured as anybusiness.co.uk; under the proposal, a competing structure would be introduced: anybusiness.uk. Domainindex has also issued an Investors Warning for co.uk and .uk TLD, and believes the introduction of the .uk TLD would massively destroy the value of existing .co.uk domains and in fact Nominet´s announcement already inflicted harm to the value of .co.uk domains and the aftermarket as well as the investment climate in the .uk TLD. Our analysis of the proposal, which Nominet defends as a move to increase Internet Security, would have several adverse effects:
The auction of .uk sites would preferentially favor trademark holders instead of existing domain holders, thereby representing an unprecedented expropriation of domain registrants and website of whom most do not own the trademark for their domain name.
The higher costs of the .uk TLD are in effect an Internet tax for businesses in the UK and especially to domainers as it will raise the cost of holding an inventory by 800% and will lead to drop of many .co.uk names that until recently have represented significant value.
The move will create more bureaucracy and red-tape.
British companies would have massive rebranding costs.
The proposal will create months or years of uncertainty as the issue is litigated in the courts.
We will closely monitor the progress of the Nominet consultation and may issue further rating changes accordingly.
Domainindex also announced the following rating changes in November:
.me up from A to AA (because of the good performance of the TLD)
.eu down from AA to A (because we expect the TLD to suffer from nTLDs and weak economy in the Eurozone)
.info down from AA to A (because we expect the TLD to suffer more from nTLDs)
.mobi down from A to B (because we expect the TLD to suffer more from nTLDs)
.tel down from AA to A (because we expect the TLD to suffer more from nTLDs)"
