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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I am quite involved in this world and I probably ought to redeclare something I declared earlier in the Committee stage. I have been sitting on the Nominet policy advisory body for a number of years. I do not receive any remuneration for it so I have no financial interest in this at all, but I have been involved in many of the discussions around this area. I can see exactly what the Government are getting at. Just as they made a general comment at the start, I should like to make the following general comment. I can see exactly why the Government want to take these reserve powers. I, too, regard the .UK domain name as a UKplc asset. I am not sure that we would have ended up with the governance structure that we have if we had realised way back, when this was all set up under an exchange of letters with ICANN, that the internet would become so important. I welcome the Government’s provisions in this area. The amendments that I have tabled seek to make them either more flexible or to tweak them very slightly. They do not seek to alter the Government’s basic intention. Therefore, I welcome this set of amendments. I was concerned that someone who was with a registry that had nothing to do with the UK might be caught up by this. Therefore, I think that this is a very sensible set of amendments. It is probably worth flagging up that certain issues may arise. For instance, I believe that proposals have been floated to have a .Scot top-level domain. The question arises whether that concerns Scotland or the worldwide Scottish diaspora. We can have a hefty argument about which it concerns. However, .Scotland would clearly relate to a part of the UK. The same would apply to .Cymru, .Wales and .Welsh. Therefore, arguments could arise in the future about the finer points of this. I like the idea of .fishshops. Would "sh" appear twice in the middle, or not? There is a phishing opportunity there.