the dot eu gold rush

jmiller · #1 (**permalink**) 08-31-2006, 12:43 PM

Apparently, the scramble of dot-eu domains was a real cluster@$&%!

I made fun of everbody, so don't get too ticked at me. I'm an equal opportunity offender.

Article here.

bj · #2 (**permalink**) 08-31-2006, 12:59 PM

One only wonders who managed to register the epithet . .

f*ck.eu

jmcc · #3 (**permalink**) 08-31-2006, 03:13 PM

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.

thecat · #4 (**permalink**) 09-01-2006, 08:45 AM

who the hell wants .eu anyway? its just another extension, .com or country extensions are the only way to go. I wonder whats coming next? .world?

jmcc · #5 (**permalink**) 09-01-2006, 02:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thecat

who the hell wants .eu anyway? its just another extension, .com or country extensions are the only way to go.

Good question. From what I can see, the majority of .eu registrations are speculative. There is probably around 500K actual business and trademark doms and most of these .eu doms (the core business section of the .eu) have not gone active yet. And the European ccTLD market is the toughest in the world because .co.uk (around 4.7M ) and .de (around 10M) are also fighting for registrations.

I think that .eu will shrink back to a more realistic size over the next few years - a bit like the .biz and .info gTLDs. The ccTLDs will be more important than .com as well as the domain tasting and domain kiting is cutting a lot of people out of the market. The .uk registry announced that it would prevent domain tasting and many other ccTLDs might follow suit. Even iREIT has been investing in ccTLDs (.de apparently).

begabloomers · #6 (**permalink**) 09-10-2006, 02:45 PM

Geo-targetting wise, what would be the advantage to a .EU? A UK business with UK servers would probably want a .co.uk I would think . So where would a .EU be "located" in Brussels?

The controls on a .com.au did require a registered business name similar, or the same as, the domain name to be purchased which stops a lot of speculalive trading in names.

parkquick · #7 (**permalink**) 11-29-2006, 10:17 PM

Great article, Jason. Sedo (the big domain name marketplace) officially lowered their estimates of the value of .eu domains. They announced this at the TRAFFIC conference last month. I'm not sure if this is related to the mess that happened at the beginning or not.

jmcc · #8 (**permalink**) 11-29-2006, 10:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by parkquick

Great article, Jason. Sedo (the big domain name marketplace) officially lowered their estimates of the value of .eu domains. They announced this at the TRAFFIC conference last month. I'm not sure if this is related to the mess that happened at the beginning or not.

How far down did SEDO lower their estimates for .eu? From the figures I am seeing, the .eu TLD is collapsing.

Regards...jmcc