.eu

.eu is the new country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the European Union, and organisations and citizens of EU member states, which was launched on December 7, 2005. Trademark owners got first shot at registrations, through a sunrise process (similar to the launch of .info), in an effort to prevent cybersquatting. Full registration started on April 7, 2006.

The TLD is administered by EURid, a consortium consisting of the local ccTLD registry operators of Belgium, Czech Republic, Sweden and Italy.

Establishment and Sunrise period

The .eu TLD was approved by ICANN on March 22, 2005 and put in the Internet root zone on May 2, 2005 . Even though the EU is not a country (it is an intergovernmental and supranational organisation), there are precedents of issuing top-level domains to other entities—e.g. .nato

Registrants with prior rights (trademarks, geographic names, company names...) could apply during the Sunrise Period. The registration needed to be accompanied by documents proving the claim to ownership of a certain name. The decision was then made by PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium, which had been chosen as the validation agent by EURid. Most companies were able to register their trademarks due to this process.

On February 7 2006, the registry was opened for company and trade names. In the first 15 minutes, there were 27,949 total applications, and after one hour, 71,235.

Landrush

On April 7, 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 Godaddy and Dotster suffered from long queues and unresponsiveness, allowing people to 'beat the queue' by registering through a registrar that had already processed its queue. As of July 2006 more than 2 million .eu domain names were registered. It is now the third largest domain in Europe, after .de and .uk, and is the seventh largest internationally, catching up fast on .info.

Bob Parsons, CEO and co-founder of Godaddy, 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."

Patrik Lindén, spokeman for EURid, denied the allegations by Parsons, stating that "^* verified that each registrar was an individual legal entity. Each had to sign an agreement with us, and prepay 10,000 euros." 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?"

Use by the European Union institutions

The second-level domain .europa.eu has been reserved for EU institution sites, with most institutions making the switch from .eu.int to using .europa.eu domains on Europe day, May 9, 2006. Others such as the ECB have switched to .eu .

Domain hacks

Since the domain is open to individual registrations, it is expected there will be high demand from Portuguese-language speakers, since "eu" means "I" (first person pronoun) in Portuguese. Citizens of Portugal will be able to register these domains, but those of Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa will not. "Eu" also means "I" in Romanian, so the same is to be expected when Romania joins the EU in 2007.

References

External links

Country code top-level domains | European Union