It was a complete mess. A pile of American speculators used front companies in the UK, Cyprus and a few other EU countries to register tens of thousands of .eu domains. The worst case is that at least 60 to 80% of .eu domains are speculative. Of course there were EU speculators as well.

The landrush on April 7th was a complete mess. Hundreds of phantom "registrars", mainly US and Canadian but with a few German and Austrian operations, snagged the bulk of the domains.

Most of the blame lies with the utterly incompetent management of Eurid and the idiotically naive regulations that were created by people ignorant of the domain business. There were no barriers to becoming a registrar for .eu - just pay the money. So the speculators created hundreds of "registrars" and basically overwhelmed the pathetically weak Eurid system, locking out other requests for domains.

And as for the Sunrise phases where the registrants had to prove prior rights for a domain - it was a complete mess. The PwC validation process was meant to process a thousand applications a day. It had to deal with hundreds of thousands of applications and many Sunrise domains will not go active until Christmas or later. And the decisions have been flakey with trademarks owners with long established marques losing domains to squatters with dubious Benelux "trademarks".

In Europe, Eurid and the .eu gTLD has no credibility. It is a perfect example of what happens when you combine greed with moronicism. The landrush was, for legitimate registrars, like buying a ticket for a lottery only to discover that someone else had bought half the tickets. (I was quoted in the WSJ article but it was a tiny fraction of what I had said.)

Also I have a rather unique view of the mess - I've been working on reconstructing the .eu zone and have about 70% of the domains mapped.