.eu Domains to Go on Sale in a Month

conJunk writes "The BBC is running an article about the start of .eu TLD sales. From the article: 'The .eu domain was launched in December and opens to the public in four weeks. Trademark holders have had a 'sunrise period' since December to register their own trademarks... and all EU institutions will begin using the .eu domain in their web addresses from April next year.' Winners and Losers? Volkswagen scooped Ralph-Lauren for polo.eu by three and a half minutes." Update: 03/10 15:32 GMT by Z : Volvo != Volkswagen.

organisation?

[Midnight Thunder]

Will everything be straight under .eu, or will there be some notion of categorisation, such as .com.eu, .edu.eu, .gov.eu, etc?

Why bother?

[hcdejong]

The only organisation for which the .eu domain makes sense is the European Union (government). Other organisations, both commercial and nonprofit tend to be either national or worldwide.
I suspect many .eu domains will end up being redirected to existing .com websites, with large companies buying YA domain name just to prevent domain squatters etc.

Re:organisation?

[timster]

I find the categorization in DNS to be about as useful as the "Subject" header on emails I send to my mom.

It's just not possible on today's Internet to meaningfully separate domains into a handful of arbitrary categories. Useful organization will require a new system; for most people, that system is Google.

Re:Why bother?

[Rich0]

The polo.eu example only serves to underscore this. Why do we need new TLDs? The typical answer to this is that we're out of easy-to-type domain names. So, what do we do - we charge a million domain-holders $10 each to replicate the .com domain to the .eu domain. How exactly does this solve the problem? The only thing that would make sense would be to disqualify anybody from holding the same address in more than one TLD. The main objection to this is due to squatters leveraging typing errors or the confusion over com/net/org/whatever. Well, if that is the real problem then the fix is very simple - just restrict everything to a single domain and then you don't have volvo.com, volvo.org, and volvo.net...

The real purpose of new TLDs is to drum up revenue for registrars...

Re:organisation?

[Conanymous Award]

While we're at it, can you explain to me why there are no www.domain.uk URLs? Every British URL ends in co.uk. Same in Japan (co.jp). The explanation is prolly damn simple, but I've never encountered it (and maybe I'm too lazy to google it up).

.cat: when did that appear?

[adnonsense]

Slightly off-topic (but only slightly, it's European): has anyone noticed the emergence of the .cat tld? As in barcelona.cat [barcelona.cat]?

(I'd call dibs on cool.cat [cool.cat] but I can't find any registrar offering it).

Re:.cat: when did that appear?

[gronofer]

This surprises me. I wonder how other successionist areas are doing in getting their own top level domains. There's no sign of .kurdistan or .quebec.

Note the odd claim in the Wikipedia article about .cat:

ICANN has expressly prohibited the use of the .cat domain for pages about cats, unless they are written in Catalan or concerning Catalan culture.