The EU just does not get it

Impetus

The EU insists on using long winded, bureaucratic, hard to remember, urls for its websites. This makes the EU's presence on the internet as in-hospitable and nasty as the EU is in the real world. Quelle surprise!

eg The border management agency Frontex is not frontex.eu.

No. It is frontex.europa.eu.

Europa = eu. Why repeat the word - tautology.

It is not unlike most British domains. They don't get it either.

eg xyz.co.uk.

1) One assumes that the entity is a company, unless it is a well known government department or agency or "Ministry" as they call it.

2) .uk does not exist in ISO 3166 - the UN list of country codes. Britain has been assigned country code 'gb'. UK is more appropriately assignable to Ukraine - who have to put up with UA because Britain has managed to use its power to freeze 'uk' from use by other countries. ie Britain has managed to freeze two country codes in ISO 3166.

While GB has finally changed regulations to allow people and entities to register .uk entities (without the co etc), they still use a non-standard country code.

Similar issues apply to Ireland. The nasty Irish banking system used to refer to the "IR£" before the Euro. IR has been assigned by the UN to Iran. Mainly British entities often refer to IRL/IE as RoI. Is this an attempt to deny the existence of Ireland as a country, or to pretend that Northern Ireland is a country who has also been assigned IE/IRL by the UN?

The citizens of most countries know and use their country code. eg DK = Denmark, CH = Switzerland, AT = Austria etc.

The use of misleading or complicated urls by government and quasi government agencies is another form of cyber confusion/terrorism - as the Saxons might term it.

The Swiss get it. if you go to rail.ch you will be diverted to the Swiss transport timetable, in English - which covers not only trains, but trams, buses, boats and other forms of transport, on a door to door, journey planner basis. The dumb Oirish don't get it either. The equivalent site to rail.ch is at http://www.journeyplanner.transportforireland.ie which is neither short nor easy to remember. Aside from the fact that the Oirish don't get public transport as a concept - they waste millions on buses that linger at stops endlessly, with only one door to get on and get off, and no national integrated ticketing system. Dublin has two tram lines. Zurich has 16. Both cities are of similar size. And so one might go on.....

johnnyskeleton

Mod note:

Hi OP,

I'm not sure this is a political issue as such. I think there are some web development discussions under the tech category and people there might be able to explain the reasoning.

Im closing this thread but can move it to the desired forum if requested.