.co.uk no longer rules, OK?

Nobody who has heard a BBC announcer trying to read out a Website address or dictated their email address over the phone would argue that URLs are the stuff of poetry - all those dots, tildes, underscores and doubleyew-doubleyew-doubleyews do catch in the throat. But at least you know where you are when you get to the .co.uk bit at the end.

Or you did. Because now you can cause further confusion by calling yourself acme.uk.co instead of acme.co.uk, thanks to an outfit called Net Register.

These helpful souls are offering to register domain names ending in .uk.co to all and sundry, for the trifling sum of £45 a time.

There is plenty of choice. Net Register's site conveniently lets you check whether your company's name has been registered as a .uk.co yet.

When I visited it before this article went to press, for an outlay of £810 I could have beaten Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Apple, Epson, Altavista, Yahoo, the BBC, Virgin, Computacenter, Azlan, Ingram Micro, PC World, Dixons and even PC Dealer to the coveted .uk.co version of their corporate brand. Of the names I tried, only amazon.uk.co had been registered - presumably on the principle that, with all Amazon.com's losses, another 45 quid was a mere drop in the bucket.

Now it's always good to see a bit of initiative and private enterprise, and I wish Net Register a long and profitable future. I just wish it hadn't happened upon this particular bright idea.

I reckon it's already too easy to make mistakes in internet names. I always spell out my email address letter by letter when I give it over the phone, yet people still manage to mis-spell it or stick in extra full stops where they're not welcome. If I have to say 'that's dot co dot uk, not dot uk dot co' every time, my mailbox will be forever empty.

And supposing some other Paul Bray sets up an email address ending @cix.uk.co instead of @cix.co.uk? We'd be sending each other little 'oops, sorry' messages all day long.

Then there are the Websites. Every time I visit a company's cyber presence, I shall either have to toss up between .co.uk and .uk.co, or go to the trouble of trying both. If they're identical or they point to each other, I shall feel I've wasted my time. If they're different, how shall I know which is genuine, without performing the virtual equivalent of testing their silver strip or putting a pea under their mattress?

What will happen when .co.uk and .uk.co are both used up? Will there be a similar battle between .co.uk.co and .uk.co.uk, or .ku.oc and .oc.ku?

Will the wheels of e-commerce grind to a halt? Will there be a resurgence of the high street, the public library and the pigeon post?

I think I'll go back to communicating by telephone. Oh no, that's no good. They've changed the phone numbers, too. Oh well.