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Comment by ealexhudson | Hacker News Reader

Please don't. The page title doesn't make clear the actual impact of this, the "click bait" is much more informative.

I sincerely hope no-one in the UK is running a substantial business on an .EU domain; the damage of this could be significant for them.

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> Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. Don't editorialize.

Above from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've seen this rule commonly applied to HN submissions. To me, this title is clearly editorializing and more misleading than the original. There is no mention of "317k .eu domains" in the text. There is even no explicit mention of cancellation. What is mentioned is eligibility for renewals and new registrations.

Does anyone know what's the source of this number (317k)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu#Actual_use says that the number of apparently UK owned .eu domains was 344,584, but there's no citation for that claim.

After I first read about it I did some light cursory Googling around, and the press coverage that was the most detailed at the time was @ The Register [1]. Although they report the number to be ~317k, they do not disclose a source -- but I chose to go with it anyway.

To be honest I forgot that folks around here can get their panties in a real bunch over the titles of submissions -- and I'm not saying they're wrong, but in my mind the title is far less important than the actual meat of the issue and the discussion/debate that it (hopefully) generates here on HN. However, there are rules for the titles, and it wasn't my intention to break them. It was my mistake.

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1: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/29/eu_dumps_300000_uko...

It isn't informative if it's untrue, and there's no way for us to easily verify how true it is. That's one reason we have the rules about titles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Hi, I submitted this article (and it's original title). FWIW (not that you asked), but I don't mind at all if the title of the submission is changed. I fully understand why you have the rules, and it was not my intention to go against them. IMHO, the 'title' of the submission is far, far less important than the actual meat of the issue, and in the context of HN, the entire point of submission, at least to me, is to foster some [hopefully] interesting dialog, discussion, and debate (while remaining civilized of course, we're all adults here, everyone should act like it)

What kind of damage? Couldn't any business in the UK create a subsidiary in the EU and transfer the domain to that?

I suspect that the cost (in time and money) to set up a subsidiary in the EU may be significant, especially for small companies.

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