I’ve just had an email from the Number 10 propaganda department telling me about all the wonderful things our Prime Minister has been doing. One of the things in it was a link to an “EU Summit minisite”.
I clicked on the link to see what it was all about and it came up with the address http://eusummit.govblogs.co.uk. A government blogs website? Looks interesting. So what’s at http://www.govblogs.co.uk? A 123-reg holding page. 123-reg? Since when has the British government used 123-reg for their websites? Suspicious (out of character I know), I popped onto a whois website to check it out. The domain is registered to a Simon Dickson, address unknown because he’s apparently a “non-trading private individual”. Strange, because this website is being promoted as a government website and it has the headers and footers of the Prime Minister’s website.
So who is Simon Dickson? I’ve found a reference to a Simon Dickson who happens to be a Liebour Party donor. Co-incidence? It’s not as if they haven’t got form for this sort of thing, after all.
Edit:
The surname is “Dickson”, not “Dixon”.
Edit 2:
Simon Dickson says, in the comments, he has no links to Liebour.
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There is something fishy about this.
It it is a government site why has it got a .co.uk domain instead of a .gov.uk
The copyright for the EUssr summit page goes to the number 10 copyright page, claiming to be crown copyright.
Hi, I’m Simon Dickson. I’m a website consultant – and for the record, I’m not a Labour donor. You’ll find me at the top of Google’s search results for my name.
I’m afraid it’s a pretty straightforward, and slightly boring story. The Downing St team are mid-way through preparing some significant DNS changes to the various .gov.uk domains they hold. It was going to be confusing to suddenly introduce a new gov.uk subdomain for the Brussels summit travel-blog. So instead, *I* purchased the govblogs.co.uk domain, using 123-reg: the same company I use to manage (almost) all my domain registrations, due to their excellent rates and flexible control system. It cost me a couple of quid, and took a couple of minutes – and the problem was solved. I own the domain, not HMG.
There’s no great conspiracy here, I’m afraid. And since I’m not connected with the Labour Party, and stress my political neutrality in all my business activity, I would be grateful if you would amend your article and its headline.
govblogs.co.uk says it’s Crown Copyright and uses the headers and footers of the Downing Street website to look like a government website. If this is a private enterprise set up, presumably for a fee from the British government, then why does it say it’s Crown Copyright and why does it say that it’s registered to a non-trading private individual?
Is govblogs.co.uk a personal site of yours or a website provided to the British government for a fee and who owns the content – you or the Crown?
I’ve added a note to the bottom of the post to say you’ve said you have nothing to do with Liebour but the title is a question, it doesn’t need changing.
I’m sorry if I didn’t make myself entirely clear.
There is no site at http://www.govblogs.co.uk, just a default holding page. There is no government project to use govblogs.co.uk. I own govblogs.co.uk, and not HM Government. I have not charged Downing Street for the use of a subdomain of govblogs.co.uk.
You’re wrong to say that ‘govblogs.co.uk says it’s Crown Copyright’. The site at the eusummit.govblogs.co.uk subdomain consists of Crown Copyright material. Ownership of a domain, and ownership of the content on a site located at a subdomain, is perfectly normal. (Google does not own the contents of Iain Dale’s Blogspot-hosted site, for example.)
You’re welcome to ask the question whether No10 is promoting a Labour website. But I’m afraid the answer’s a pretty flat ‘no’, so you might want to add a ‘No’ to the title.
So the content at eusummit.govblogs.co.uk is available from another address? Is it hosted on one of your servers or on a British government server?
Iain Dale’s blog – to reuse your example – is hosted on Blogger but also accessible from the domain iaindale.com. Are you saying that there’s no site at iaindale.com? Taking this blog as another example – the subdomain blog.wonkosworld.co.uk will get you the content at http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/wordpress but would you say there was no site at blogs.wonkosworld.co.uk?
I could create a subdomain here to point at a British government website but the difference between me doing it and you doing it is that the British government isn’t sending an email to people pointing them at my domain and passing it off as an official government website.