.eu is the
country code top-level domain
(ccTLD) for the
European Union (EU).
Launched 7 December 2005, the domain is available for organisations
and citizens in
EU
member states.
The TLD is administered by EURid, a consortium consisting of the national
ccTLD registry operators of Belgium
, Sweden
, Italy
and the
Czech
Republic
.
Trademark owners were able to submit
registrations through a
sunrise
period, in an effort to prevent
cybersquatting. Full registration started on
7 April 2006.
History
Establishment
The .eu TLD was approved by
ICANN on 22 March
2005 and put in the Internet
root zone
on 2 May 2005. Even though the EU is not a country (it is a
sui generis intergovernmental and
supranational organisation), there are
precedents of issuing top-level domains to other entities—e.g.
.nato
.eu.int was the subdomain most used by the European
Commission
and the European Parliament
, based on the .int generic top-level domain (gTLD) for
international bodies, until 9 May 2006. The .eu domain
(ccTLD) was launched in December 2005, and because of this most
.eu.int domain names changed to .
europa.eu
on
Europe day, 9 May 2006.
Sunrise period
The
Sunrise Period was broken into
two phases. The first phase, which began on 7 December 2005 was to
facilitate applications by registrants with prior rights based on
trademarks and geographic names. The second phase began on 7
February 2006 and covered company, trade and personal names. In the
case of all Sunrise applications, the application needed to be
accompanied by documents proving the claim to ownership of a
certain right.
The decision was then made by PricewaterhouseCoopers
Belgium, which had been chosen as the validation
agent by EURid.
On 7 February 2006, the registry was opened for company, trade and
personal names. In the first 15 minutes, there were 27,949 total
applications, and after one hour, 71,235.
Landrush
On 7 April 2006 at 11 am CET registration became possible for
non-trademark holders. Most people requesting domains had asked
their registrars to put their requested domains in a queue,
ensuring the best chance to register a domain. This way more than
700,000 domains were registered during the first 4 hours of
operation.
Some large registrars like Go Daddy
and small
registrars like Dotster suffered from long
queues and unresponsiveness, allowing people to 'beat the queue' by
registering through a registrar that had already processed its
queue. By August 2006, 2 Million .eu domains had been
registered. It is now the third largest domain in Europe, after
.de and
.uk, and is the
seventh largest internationally.
Bob Parsons, CEO and co-founder of Go
Daddy, criticized the landrush process designed by EURid.
Particularly, he condemned the use of shell companies by some
registrars. In his blog, he stated "These companies, instead of
only registering their real active registrars, created hundreds of
new "phantom" registrars." Parsons cited a group of about 400
companies, all with similar address and contact information based
in New York, each registered as an
LLC; in his opinion, these were
phantom registrars "created to hijack the .EU landrush."
These "phantom" registrars effectively had hundreds of
opportunities of registering a domain whereas a genuine registrar
effectively only had one opportunity to register the same domain.
Thus some registrants were crowded out of the .eu landrush process
and many generic .eu domain names are now owned by the companies
using these "phantom" registrars.
Patrik Lindén, spokesman for EURid, denied the allegations by
Parsons, stating that "[EURid] verified that each registrar was an
individual legal entity. Each had to sign an agreement with us, and
prepay €10,000." Parsons didn't dispute that each registrar was a
separate legal entity, but noted that creating such entities was
trivial: "Mr. Linden seemed proud that the EURid registry verified
that each applicant was a legal entity before it was accredited.
Take a moment and think about what that means. You can form a
“legal entity” for $50 – an LLC – and you are good to go. Is that
what we want a registry to do? Don’t we want them instead to make
sure that the organization it allows to provide end-users with its
domain names – especially Europe’s very own domain name – are
actually in the domain name registration business?"
The EURid organisation investigated some allegations of abuse, and
in July 2006 announced the suspension of over 74,000 domain names
and that they were suing 400 registrars for breach of contract. The
status of the domains was changed from ACTIVE to ON-HOLD. This
meant that the domains could not be moved or have their ownership
changed. The registrars also lost their access to the EURid
registration database meaning that they could no longer register
.eu domain names. The legal action relates to the practice of
Domain name warehousing,
whereby large numbers of domain names are registered, often by
registrars, with the intention of subsequently selling them on to
third parties. EURid rules state that applications for domains can
only be made after a legitimate application has been made to a
registrar. The 74,000 applications were made in the name of only
three Cyprus registered companies— Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and
Gabino Ltd.
The affected registrars, joined in the action by the affected
registrants obtained a provisional order from the Court of First
Instance in Brussels, Belgium on 27 September 2006. The court
ordered EURid to release the blocked domain names or else pay a
fine of €25000 per hour for each affected domain name. EURid
complied with the court order and changed the status of the domains
from ON HOLD to ACTIVE and restored EURid registration database
access to the affected registrars.
The main legal action, that of EURid seeking the registrar
agreements between EURid and the registrars in question to be
dissolved has still to be heard.
Use by the European Union institutions
The
second-level domain
.europa.eu has been reserved for EU institution sites, with
institutions and agencies making the switch from
.eu.int to .
europa.eu
domains on the
Europe day of 9
May 2006.
The European Central Bank
is however not under the "Europa umbrella" due to
its political independence, and uses only ECB.int, but ecb.europa.eu is an
alias.
Actual use
The main users of .eu domains are websites with pan-European or
cross-border intentions and audiences. It is often used to
emphasise the 'European identity' of a website, as opposed to the
website having a strictly national ccTLD or global "dotcom" nature.
Alternative uses include basque webpages (as the
initial letters or Euskadi
or the
language Euskara) and Romanian
, Portuguese
, or Galician
personal sites, as eu is the equivalent of
the English pronoun I in their languages.
In most countries of the EU, the national ccTLDs have the major
share of the market with the remainder spread over
.com/
.net/
.org/
.info/
.biz. As a result of this, .eu has had an uphill battle
to gain a significant share of these national markets. The dominant
players tend to be the national ccTLD and .com. The other TLDs such
as
.net,
.org and to a
lesser extent
.info and
.biz have progressively smaller shares of these
national markets.
Over one year after the launch of .eu (5 July 2007), the number of
.de domains registered was 11,079,557 according
to the
German .de registry's statistics page, while number of
German owned .eu domains according to
EURid's
statistics page was 796,561. The number of
.uk domains registered was 6,038,732 according to
.uk registry Nominet's statistics page. The
number of apparently UK owned .eu domains was 344,584.
Parking and redirects
- Many domain registrants use their .eu website as a web portal
containing a list of their national websites with national ccTLDs. (example: www.sony.eu)
- Other registrants have registered a .eu domain name to protect
the brand name of their main website or domain, and redirect
visitors to their pre-existing national ccTLD or .com website.
(example: www.champagne.eu)
- Many .eu websites are simply parking pages with Pay Per Click advertisements. ISPs and web
hosters will often point unused domains to a parking webpage with
PPC advertising.
- Many apparently active .eu websites are really aliases for
existing the national ccTLD or .com websites.
According to page 20 of
EURid's
Annual Report for 2006, the breakdown of .eu domain
ownership figures on 31 December 2006 was:
- Registrants with more than 10,000 domains: 6
- Registrants with 5,000-9,999 domains: 18
- Registrants with 1,000-4,999 domains: 64
- Registrants with 100-999 domains: 1,257
- Registrants with 10-99 domains: 20,886
- Registrants with 6-9 domains: 22,933
- Registrants with 5 domains: 13,200 - (66,000 domains)
- Registrants with 4 domains: 23,007 - (92,028 domains)
- Registrants with 3 domains: 42,887 - (128,661 domains)
- Registrants with 2 domains: 115,543 - (231,086 domains)
- Registrants with 1 domain: 610,679
The number of registrants with five domains or fewer registered in
.eu ccTLD was, according to these statistics, 805,316. These
registrants accounted for 1,128,454 domains out of 2,444,947 .eu
domains registered as of 31 December 2006. These registrations,
typically those of individuals and companies protecting their
brand, only represent 46% of the number of registered .eu
domains.
It had been actively targeted during the Sunrise period by
speculators using fast track Benelux trademarks to create
prior
rights on various high value generic terms and during the
landrush by speculators using EU front companies in the UK and
Cyprus to register large numbers of domains. While speculative
activity occurred with the launch of other domains, it was the
scale of the activity that called into question the competence of
EURid in protecting the integrity of eu ccTLD.
The number of .eu domain registrations during the year after the
landrush 7 April 2006 to 6 April 2007 seems to have peaked at
approximately 2.6 million .eu domains. The market adjustment that
follows a landrush in any domain name extension ensures that the
number of registered domains will fall as many speculative domain
registrations that failed to be resold will not be renewed. This is
sometimes referred to as the
Junk Dump. On the morning of
7 April 2007, the number of active .eu domains stood at 2,590,160
with approximately 15,000 domains having been deleted since 5 April
2007.
Approximately 1.5 million .eu domains were up for renewal in April
2007. The EURid registry software is based on the DNS. be software
and domains are physically renewed at the end of the month of their
anniversary of registration. This process differs from more
sophisticated registries like that of
.com
TLD and other
ccTLDs that
operate on a daily basis. As with any post-landrush phase, an
extension shrinks as the
Junk Dump takes effect.
The extent of the shrinkage of .eu ccTLD is difficult to estimate
because EURid does not publish detailed statistics on the number of
new domains registered each day. Instead it provides only a single
figure for the number of active domains. The number of new
registrations are combined with numbers of domains registered.
Approximately 250,000 .eu domains were either deleted or moved into
quarantine by 30 April.
References
- http://www.eurid.eu/content/view/104/52/lang,en/ News item from
EURid announcing suspension of domain names and intention to sue
domain name registrars. Retrieved on 26 July 2006.
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