Over 1 Million .eu Domains and Counting

gavint writes "In the first 12 hours since "Landrush" registration of .eu Domains begun at 11:00 CET, over 1 million have been registered. Predictions of .eu becoming the second biggest domain after .com look like they may become true, with Nominet being responsible for "over four million" .uk domains, the second biggest namespace. The UK initially led the way during Landrush but have since been overtaken by Germany, with over a quarter of all registered domains. Meanwhile many "Sunrise" period applications where businesses are able to protect domains where they hold a prior right remain unprocessed, although these domains cannot be registered yet during Landrush. Over 1,000 registration agents were only allowed one connection each to EURid's servers in order to prevent problems and ensure fairness."

Re:big in GB...

[taskforce]

I think many people are going to misinterpret this article. I doubt very much that any more than 10% of the registrations (at a liberal guess) would be actual companies registering .eu domains. Most of these are probably going to be resellers and squatters, which is why the UK proportion is so high.

I can't think of any reason why a UK company would buy a .EU domain unless it was out to alienate it's customers, market to the rest of the EU under a different domain, or simply just bought every TLD for it's domain name.

Domain Squatting

[cheetah_spottycat]

Is anyone surprised? I bet that these are 5% "real" registrations, and 95% domain squatters trying to register every single word from the encyclopedia britannica and all TLAs from 'AAA' to 'ZZZ' in one session.

Re:.eu is useless, it's a domain DMZ

[mikeplokta]

If you can't think of any grocery stores in more than two EU countries, you're not thinking very hard. Try Aldi and Lidl, who both operate in numerous EU countries. In other sectors, there are chains like IKEA.

Re:EU is such a silly idea...

[wizzdude]

Well, not entirely.

The European Union is a free trade area so there are import/export duties on goods traded with the zone. There are some businesses who would therefore treat this entire area as one and for them branding themselves under an EU domain would make sense.

A UN domain would never be used for that reason as it is purely political and not economic.

Re:big in GB...

[Wellington Grey]

Yes I am an American (though I moved to London [wellingtongrey.net] three years ago). It still seems odd to me to hear my English co-workers talking about what is going on in Europe. To me it would be like hearing New Yorkers talk about taking a trip to America.

-Grey

Re:big in GB...

[Haeleth]

It still seems odd to me to hear my English co-workers talking about what is going on in Europe. To me it would be like hearing New Yorkers talk about taking a trip to America.

But I thought New Yorkers think New York is America? :P

A better example would be Hawaiians. Do they see a difference between the part of the US that's in North America and the part of the US that's in Hawaii, or is it all just "America" to them?

Double duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Then their fault is not holding it back, but rather not informing you about the concept of Landrush and Sunrise which every single other registrar was talking about.

IOW, use a registrar that doesn't suck.

Re:.eu is useless, it's a domain DMZ

[Anonymous Coward]

There are quite a lot of companies with legitimate interest in a .eu domain and will use it, but their number is more likely in the thousands than in the tens of thousands or millions, and all of them will retain their national domains as well. Generally speaking you're right.

During the sunrise phases, an absurd number of new trademarks have been registered in nonsensical categories. "Sex (tm)" in the groceries category, registered right before the sunrise phase, qualifies as "prior right" to "sex.eu"?

Registrars were only allowed to submit a small fixed number of registrations per second during the landrush, so what did some of them do to get through their queues faster? They created companies like "domain robot 1", "domain robot 2", etc. and entered them as registrars as well. You see, there's the British "Ltd.", which requires just 1 pound to open. Maybe that's how the UK managed to get more domains in at the start? On the other hand, anyone in Europe can now open a "Ltd." company now, so in proper turbo-capitalism fashion, it's probably their own fault for not doing the same.

My not-so-common surname btw was registered by a well-known domain grabber, who now uses it as another "this on ebay" spam site. I know of about half a dozen companies who would have been able to legitimately claim prior right on that domain. None of them did, probably because the enormous costs of registering during the sunrise phases far outweighed the benefit. It doesn't bother me too much that I didn't get the domain, because I have it in my country's TLD and in one of the GTLDs, but I would really have wanted one of these companies to get it instead, not some useless domain squatter. I'll see if it's a sign of a trend or just a coincidence, but I'd wager that "-site:.eu" will have to join "-site:.info" in my Google search template soon if I don't want to drown in spam search results.

Just an aside: The second biggest namespace is the .de country TLD of Germany, with 9.7 million domains. Behind that is ".net" with about 7 million domains and only then comes ".uk" with 4.8 million domains. These results aren't really surprising as the .de TLD is the most cost effective TLD. You can get them for just cents a month, and that's the quantity-1 price, not just for resellers. The .de-TLD servers are all over the world, so the performance is excellent. It's not a "cheap" TLD. But hey, ICANN probably knew what they were doing when they handed .net to Verisign instead of to the DeNIC non-profit.

It wasn't fair!

[Cronq]

"Over 1,000 registration agents were only allowed one connection each to EURid's servers in order to prevent problems and ensure fairness."

Fairness? Please check official registrars list on the eurid web site. There are tons of clons there sharing the same address and/or telephone number just to avoid 1 connection to eurid limit.

And what eurid did about this? Nothing.

A Different Opinion

[Zx-man]

Why do we need geography/politics-based domain names at all? Or, since we are already there and cannot go back, why do we need more of 'em?
Wouldn't it be more logical to have domains corresponding to specific thematics? (e.g. slashdot.compsci)