Glacier near Mont Blanc
I got an email from my hosting company saying that in two months time (if things play out as the UK government intend) I would no longer be eligible to use a .eu domain name as I would not be living in a member state of the EU.
There was self interested marketing mixed in with the public service message, and things may well not turn out as the UK government intend, but I took the point.
It was suggested that I should move to a .co.uk or .uk domain name—and why not? They were offering me one for free, for a year. When I’d finished laughing, I decided: No. If the UK leaves the EU, especially if it does so on bad terms, and especially if it does so in October, the balance of probabilities is that the UK will cease to exist in the next decade—which doesn’t make a .uk domain name seem like such a bargain. I don’t mean that’s certain to happen, just that it’s more likely than not. A bad break would cause people in Northern Ireland to re-evaluate the case for reunification, and would give a further boost to Scottish independence. Wales voted leave, but the almost inevitable failure of a cash-strapped central government to replace all of the money currently coming into Wales from the EU would be a major fillip for the nationalists. I would expect at least one of those dominoes to fall.
As a backstop I’m going to get this site an additional .xyz domain name just in case. xyz is a generic top-level domain, which broadly means that its use is not restricted by the need to prove eligibility—in contrast to restricted domains, such as .eu, whose use can be limited by geography, sponsorship, brands and the like. xyz is pretty much neutral geographically, politically and commercially—although Google has used the extension for its corporate (Alphabet Inc.) website, abc.xyz. Oh well…