Identifying ourselves as DotScots
Andrew Murray Scott (Scots Independent, Dec 2025)
2014 was the seismic year when Scotland nearly went independent – and went independent online. While the referendum was taking place, a small Glasgow-based not-for-profit charity applied to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and successfully put Scotland on the world map as the independent national identity .scot.
Now all who live and work here or who have an affinity with Scotland, including the 50 million-strong Scottish diaspora, can identify online as DotScots. It’s the perfect branding tool for highlighting Scottish business, heritage, culture and to promote our nation worldwide – alongside, or instead of – .uk, .org or .com. It makes us stand out, shows how committed we are, unites us as a nation. It is our online flag, our digital passport.
The Scottish Government (gov.scot) our parliament and health service are among the 32,000 DotScot registrations to date, in 62 countries around the globe, though it includes none of our local councils. The small group behind the DotScot Registry had to work incredibly hard, first to create a successful application to ICANN then to build support and get public and private organisations to use the identity when it launched in 2014, and that hard work continues.
I’m proud to say the Scots Independent and the National are DotScot users but strangely not the Scottish National Party or any of its branches and groups. The only political parties using DotScot are the Scottish Greens, Your Party, and weirdly, Reform UK.
Some public bodies have also shown a strange reluctance. Visit Scotland, our national tourist organisation, is a DotCom. Wouldn’t visitscotland.scot better capitalise on worldwide interest in Scottish culture? And Creative Scotland, supposedly at the centre of our nation’s arts, is a DotCom, despite research conducted by the world’s biggest internet provider, IONOS, in which 70% of respondents said they would trust a .scot website over any other domain and 71% of Scottish consumers said they would prefer to buy from a .scot website. Recent research by the worldwide GeoGTLD group even suggests using a domain such as .scot improves Google rankings and search indices.
Other cultural gatekeepers use obscure brandings and generic acronyms. The National Gallery of Scotland is a DotOrg, the National Museums of Scotland, repository of Scotland’s cultural treasure, hides its Scottishness in virtual obscurity as nms.ac.uk. The National Library of Scotland literally subjugates its nationhood as nls.uk and the ‘Official gateway to Scotland’ (which) provides information on Scottish culture and living, working, studying, visiting, and doing business in Scotland is… Scotland.org. Wouldn’t it be more powerful as Scotland.scot? Because DotScot isn’t just a shortened form of Scotland it also signifies the individuals who identify as ‘scot’. It has people power!
As an author and early adopter of websites I moved quickly to get my own .scot domain within months of it launching but you don’t need a website to become a DotScot. For as little as £1 a month, you can join more than 15,000 others who use a DotScot email address. It all helps to promote Scotland and our aspirations. Visit https://dot.scot/become-a-dotscot/ or enter domains.scot/email into a browser for more information.