To two domain, or not to two domain
As you may have guessed, the United Kingdom has the top level domain of .uk. But we also have the top level domain for Great Britain - which is .gb!
It is staggeringly unlikely that you would ever have encountered a .gb domain in the wild. The only domain which is registered, though inactive, is hmg.gb - standing for His Majesty's Government. The domain was originally created in the mid 1980s, and abandoned at some point in the 1990s. There are no active domains which use .gb and today, the government only uses .gov.uk for its domains.
The Securing Government Services team at CDDO are currently in the middle of a housekeeping exercise to clean up and remove legacy services. As part of that, we are considering whether we should remove the .gb top level domain from the internet. And, we'd like your opinion on whether or not we should do that.
Administratively, it is quite simple. The .gb top level domain is delegated to the government from an organisation called ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. We would simply need to tell them that .gb is no longer needed, and it can thus be removed from the Internet.
To domain
One of the Cabinet Office's key responsibilities is supporting collective government. As such, we have no desire to set up a separate set of domains solely for Great Britain rather than the United Kingdom.
Rationalising the estate of top level domains we have to monitor and protect will free up resources in our team. As we begin the process of moving to a new domain registry for .gov.uk it makes sense to remove any obsolete top level domains, so we don't have to pay to administer them.
There is no cost to us to hand the domain back. In fact, removing it might save us a small amount of money because we will have one less resource to monitor for security issues.
To not domain
There is a risk that if handed back another country might try to claim it for themselves. We judge this risk to be extremely low. Great Britain is assigned the .gb domain because of the policies in ISO 3166. The UK could then officially object to another country using .gb if we were concerned.
However, even if that unlikely event did occur - almost no-one would mistake a .gb domain for a .uk domain, because .gb has, as outlined, been obsolete for over thirty years.
That is the question
So, it is our intention to inform ICANN early in 2023 that the UK wishes to retire .gb. We expect this to be a straightforward administrative procedure.
We are contacting organisations which we think might be interested in this proposal and will assess their responses.
If you have any comments or questions about this proposal, please leave a comment on this blog post.
14 comments
Comment by Fili posted on
Retire .gb, with the new gTLDs it is unlikely any other country or organization will claim it.
Comment by Jon Ribbens posted on
They couldn't claim it, it's the ISO-3166 code for the UK. (I think because Ukraine also wanted UK so nobody got it, but don't quote me on that.) Unless Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK of course, in which case neither "UK" nor "GB" will be appropriate and we might end up with everyone in England having to move their domains to .EN or something...
Comment by Dan Brickley posted on
There may also be costs associated with losing control of it.
Plus it could look like, or be spun as, pre-judging the outcome of political processes (“We will never need .GB because NI will forever be part of the UK. And to prove it, we are throwing it away on behalf of all future occupants of these rainy Isles”.)
Comment by Mike Meredith posted on
Blimey that's a blast from the past. It also used to be used for some X.400-based email stuff - someone from JANET might remember. Might have been tied in with UK.AC.MHS-RELAY? As I recall, there was a certain amount of pressure in favour of X.400 email in the mid-1990s.
I'd lean in favour of hanging on to it - if you "own" a thing you have better control over it.
Comment by Mark Tomkins posted on
Thanks, Terence. Been working in this space for 30 years and admit I never knew it existed. It's simple - it should be retired. It's 100% obsolete and such a low risk of reuse and misuse. The only other country that I can think of is Gabon but they have .ga and unlikely to change. And ICANN would consult CDDO if there was ever a request for use. Means there's a bit more resource to manage the .gov.uk framework to help wider parish & town council domain adoption for improved Tier 1 government security and message authenticity.
Comment by greg posted on
Is there a low cost option to park the domain, so it can't be reused?
Comment by Harry posted on
Clarification: GB is the ISO 3166-1 code for the United Kingdom, and not for Great Britain. UK doesn't denote any country (though it's 'reserved').
That's why the UK's Olympic team is 'Team GB', and until very recently the international code for UK number plates (including in Northern Ireland) was GB.
I don't think this changes your conclusion though – there's no need to hold on to .gb.
Comment by Wayne posted on
If since mid 80’s there’s only ever been one user, and most people assume (correctly) it’s .uk rather than .gb inform icann and retire the tld.
Comment by Jon Ribbens posted on
dra.hmg.gb, dfhnet.dra.hmg.gb, delos.dra.hmg.gb, and hermes.dra.hmg.gb are all "active" in the sense of having published DNS records, and I assume DRA I mean DERA I mean RDERA I mean DSTL are not the sort of people you want to annoy if it turns out they're still using them 🙂
Comment by Robert Watts posted on
I’d say keep it.
The international ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the UK is GB. ( not Uk ) To send the tld off back into the pot, might just confuse issues further. Appreciate it’s all a bit messy out there..
Further, down the line when we lose Scotland or Wales or NI due to the behaviour of English politicians in Westminster and are no longer a “United” Kingdom we may well decide that a .Uk tld just is no longer fit for the island of Britain and in this regard the largest of which will be “Great” Britain.
Will someone then decide that the use of .uk is politically inept or embarrassing and hark for the return of gb? Possibly
I’d keep it, contingency etc.
Comment by Matthew Harris posted on
Great rid... Hardly anyone outside of government even recognises the distinction between the UK and Great Britain.
Comment by Simon Gray posted on
What might help inform the commentary is knowledge of exactly how much resource it takes to hold on to it? There’s a difference between it taking a staff member a day a month and £100,000 a year to keep on top of it and it take a staff member a day every three, six, 12 months and £10,000 a year.
.gb might be reserved anyway as a country TLD, but are all two-letter TLDs reserved as country TLDs? So basically, whilst ICANN policy might prevent the newly-formed Republic of Gabloggi from taking over the TLD, is there a potential risk if it’s released of ICANN creating a new gTLD for companies which specialise in some kind of cosmetic surgery for mouths?
(I have no horse in the chukkah on this so have no opinion one way or the other as to the outcome, beyond wanting to ensure a decision isn’t made which is regretted in the future)
Comment by Chris Woods posted on
Keep it, start using it for select things (akin to how public services and government and Royals get top-level .UK domains), or gift it to Gibraltar, but don't relinquish it to ICANN. They will surely hawk it commercially as a generic top-level TLD regardless of its current association with ISO country codes. Meanwhile the cost to HMG is surely incremental for maintaining .GB, even if parked and not actually serving registrations.
Comment by Rex Wickham (2020Media.com) posted on
The cost to keep this .gb extenion must surely be so tiny that it pales into insignificance. As others have said, our ISO country code is GB.
Re-obtaining in the future - beyond what we in the here and now can predict - would probably be far more difficult and expensive than maintaining the trivial cost of maintaining it.