I don’t know enough about the internet naming conventions to know whether this is actually true:
In the internet world, country codes such as.uk, and
generic suffixes such as.com and.net, are known as top-level domains.
The second-level domain is whatever precedes this suffix: for
example.co,.ac or.gov. But some of our most important national
institutions – Parliament, the police, the British Library and, rather
curiously, the Ministry of Defence – have been allowed to dispense with
a shared second-level domain. Instead, they use their own name or
initials – for example, http://www.police.uk – enhancing their status while
stressing their independence.
The obvious address
for Britain’s supreme court should therefore be http://www.supremecourt.uk – a
vacant site, but one that Lord Hope has been refused.
Officials
told him it would be "too expensive" to buy – a minimum of £125,000.
And they say there is no guarantee that the naming committees would
allow "supremecourt" to be a second-level domain, given that it will be
a small institution and very few email addresses would be derived from
it.
Any ideas? Why would a vacant name cost so much? Do all the root servers have to be reprogrammed or something?
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