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“Yes” vote would be good for .scot

Kevin Murphy, September 15, 2014, Domain Registries

The prospect of a healthy .scot gTLD would be improved if this week’s Scottish independence referendum produces a majority “Yes” vote.
People living in Scotland this Thursday get the opportunity to vote to split the country from the United Kingdom after over 300 years together.
While the No campaign seems to have been winning most of the opinion polls recently, the margin has been reportedly narrowing, and there are still large numbers of undecided voters.
Whichever way the vote goes, Dot Scot will take .scot to general availability next Tuesday.
The registry is backed by Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, the leading voice of the Yes campaign, and it seems inevitable that a Yes vote will bode much better for its business prospects.
A vote to split would no doubt create a new sense of national pride in the small majority of Yes voters, spurring registrations in that community.
But, more importantly, it will mean that .scot will become, I believe, Scotland’s de facto ccTLD.
If Scotland does vote for independence, it would not formally split from the UK until, it is planned, March 2016.
The new country would not qualify for a ccTLD until some time after that — it would first have to be recognized by the United Nations, the International Standards Organization, and then ICANN.
When it did finally get a ccTLD delegated and launched, probably in 2017, its two-character string would not have much semantic relevance to most of the world’s internet users.
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-12 list, which assigns two-character codes to countries and territories, only has three strings beginning with S — SP, SQ and SW — currently unaccounted for.
.sc belongs to the Seychelles, for example, while Sao Tome and Principe has .st and Sudan has .sd.
One alternative put forward is .ab, which could be used to represent Alba, the Scots Gaelic name for Scotland.
But it’s hardly a commonly known name outside Scotland (even in the rest of the UK) and there are only 57,000 native Scots Gaelic speakers in a Scottish population of 5.3 million.
It seems pretty clear that if .scot goes up against .ab, or any other two-character string, .scot will win in the marketplace, in much the same way as .com eclipses .us today.
That would be the case even if .scot didn’t get the three-year head start that starts next week.

Scottish gTLD may launch before independence vote

Kevin Murphy, January 27, 2014, Domain Services

The application for .scot, a new gTLD for Scottish people, is ahead of schedule and is likely to launch before the nation heads to voting booths for an independence referendum later this year.
Glasgow-based applicant Dot Scot Registry signed its ICANN Registry Agreement on January 23. That’s despite having a processing priority number way down the pile at 1,453.
The company had previously expected that it would launch in “early 2015”, according to a press release. Now it’s hoping to launch before the Commonwealth Games kicks off, also in Glasgow, on July 23.
If .scot moves as quickly through the remaining stages of the application process as other registries have, it could be delegated in late March, meaning general availability could come as early as June.
This means the domain is likely to be in the hands of Scots and those of Scottish heritage before the landmark independence referendum, which is set for September 18 this year.
The vote will see Scots asked “Should Scotland be an independent country?”. If the majority says “yes”, Scotland would withdraw from the United Kingdom and become fully self-governing.
Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, said in the press release:

2014 is an exciting year for Scotland, and I’m delighted that this distinct online identity for the nation, and all who take an interest in Scotland, will become available this summer.

If Scotland does become the world’s newest formally recognized country, it will be eligible for its own two-character ccTLD too.
The string would be designated by the International Standards Organization and is not likely to be particularly meaningful. The only two-character strings remaining that begin with S are .sf, .sp, .sq and .sw.
The process of obtaining a ccTLD would also take at least a year after (if) Scotland is recognized by the United Nations as an independent nation, which wouldn’t be until at least 2016.
Whatever happens, .scot is going to see the light of day well before any potential Scottish ccTLD, perhaps making it the .com to the country’s .us over the long term.