.UK launched today

[nickreynolds]

Well the big day has arrived and .uk has been launched today and I guess 99.99% of the population are unaware that .uk even exists. Will be interesting to see how this develops and whether people will still register .co.uk rather than .uk

Myself i'm wondering to register the .uk version of a couple of penalised sites and see if I can get the content (which is good) to rank again.

[RedBar]

If you already have the .co.uk you get the next five years of .uk for free:

For the vast majority of you who already have a domain with us (over 96% of around 10.5 million domains registered), we have automatically reserved the equivalent .uk for you for free for five years. At any point during that period you can decide to register the new .uk domain as long as your existing domain continues to be registered to you.

[dotuklaunch.uk...]

I had a strange email yesterday from one of my registrars and I have asked for clarification, they said:

The intention is that the .UK domain will be replacing .CO.UK by 2019,

I haven't see that anywhere else, anyone know?

I thought that .co.uk was going to keep on going so that Nominet could have two bites of the cherry?

[RedBar]

I haven't see that anywhere else, anyone know?

Aha, just heard back from them:

when we said “replacing” we meant as the preferred UK domain name, not that the .CO.UK would cease to exist.

A couple of others picked up on this as well.

[RedBar]

I guess 99.99% of the population are unaware that .uk even exists.

I just received this:

Currently 50,000 people have take up their .UK domain on the 1st day which supports the vision of Nominet moving this forward as their primary domain.

WooHoo...that makes about 99.5%:-)

[nickreynolds]

Well it seems like many of the big boys have registered there uk verions eg ebay, yahoo,amazon. bbc etc

Those that are using it seem to be simply redirecting to their .co.uk page

ebay.uk and yahoo.uk result in a "this website is unsafe" message in my internet explorer!

[graeme_p]

That just strengthens the evidence that no one really wants this except registrars who get to sell a .uk to everyone who has a .co.uk

[engine]

Any that i'm entitled to are not being registered until the window for reservation ends in five years. What's the point in paying for it for five years!