Readers of the Children Webmag who have been with us for a long time may have become used to typing in the address of the magazine as www.children.uk.co. This was the original address and has been in use since January 2000.

If they had typed in this address after the 17th February 2003, they would have come up with a page saying “Not available.” So what happened? Had we disappeared? Had we given up?

What actually happened was that all the .uk.co domain names were wiped from the face of the internet because of a dispute between Net Registrar (the company selling and managing the domain names in the UK) and the University of the Andes in Bogota, Columbia. Yes – honestly!

It transpires that the .uk.co domain names weren’t British after all, they were Columbian and the University who administered them, apparently trying to make a few million pounds before the Columbian government took over the domain names, fell out with Net Registrar and pulled the plug on all the websites. Goodbye children.uk.co!

A court case in Columbia the following day upheld the University’s right to take their action, the judge saying “No real harm has been done.” Tell that to the 8000 sites which disappeared including Amazon, Priceline – and us.

Fortunately, we have been using the site ‘www.childrenwebmag.com’ for many months now and the majority of readers know this, so the damage was limited. However, if you know any readers who still ‘tune in’ to the ‘children.uk.co’ site, please tell them our real address.

So thank you University of the Andes – do you teach business ethics over there?