Scottish Infrastructure and Capital Investment cabinet secretary Alex Neil has asked UK communications minister Ed Vaizey to back the not-for-profit company Dot Scot Registry (DSR) in a bid to create a ‘.scot’ Internet identity.
DSR promotes the use of ‘.scot’ suffix for Scottish websites instead of ".com" or ".co.uk".
Neil said: "The Scottish Government is behind this [DSR] company because we believe there is strong demand for a dotSCOT domain and that it should be run as a public resource on a not-for-profit basis that will quickly become self-financing.
"I am sure the UK Government with its responsibility for Internet governance will want to support us.
"Across the board support would undoubtedly strengthen our hand and build momentum behind the bid.
"DotSCOT will be a wonderful asset for establishing a distinctive online identity for many organisations and people who have been described as the worldwide family of Scots and want to demonstrate that identity online."
There are over 300 suffixes available today, with a majority of them based on country codes. In 2000, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved seven new domains including .biz. This March, the regulatory body approved .xxx, an exclusive domain suffix for websites containing adult content.
In June, ICANN approved the expansion of domain names to include virtually anything as a domain suffix instead of the current 22. The move is believed to be the biggest change of the Domain Name System since its inception in the 1980s.
The new system will expand popular domains such as .com, .net and .org to include new brand, generic and geographic domain name extensions. It would be possible to have domain names such as .london, .writer. and .hotel. New domain suffixes would also include Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and other scripts.
ICANN president and chief executive officer Rod Beckstrom had said that the regulatory body has opened the Internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination.
"No one can predict where this historic decision will take us," Beckstrom had said.
