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EU Ministers Approve ".eu" Top-Level Domain
Kooki Monster writes: "The Council of Ministers unanimously approved on Wednesday the European Commission's proposition to create a ".eu" domain name. European institutions as well as private users and corporations should benefit from the new domain, as it is expected to improve the Internet's image and commercial infrastructure in Europe. Its organisation will be managed either by a non-profit institution, a private company, or an existing public administration." Note the reference to "rules recommended by the World Organisation for Intellectual Property" -- probably no hope of squatting in dot-eu.
One of the better non-statements I've seen here on Slashdot.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
gee-whiz! i am sure they needed a big comittee for this and will work on rules and regulations for the next ten years.
.-expletive- domains? -slang_for_coital_activity- that -metabolic_result-!
what is the -bleep- point of the TLDs anyways? why can't we have -really_bad_word- arbitrary TLDs? because... then all the -dont_call_them_that- companies who paid lots of money for their bank.com domains look even -filthy_word- than today? or because horrible people will register
fuck you, lameness filter!
Simply put: this .eu appears to be the equivalent of .us I don't think .eu should be used for commerce as it says, and we all know .us isn't
"spare the lachrymosity when the fulminations have inveighed"
"spare the lachrymosity when the fulminations have inveighed"
-madd
... since "eu", in portuguese, means "I". :-)
(8-DCS)
I for once feel a need to register the following as top level domains: "rom" and "mir". At last will I be able to create electronic sites under my own TLD, I think they will become quite popular with general public and known for their unique presentation style of Natalie Portman.
You can't handle the truth.
They called their currency the Euro. Then they named the an expensive fighter plane the Eurofighter. I suggest that the US name their next plane the DollarKiller or the CashBuster.
I heard somewhere that uk wasn't an ISO two letter code though. Great Britain should have .gb This apparently makes gb/uk the only country to break IANA rules (until now).
You're right -- imagine if there was a .rox or .bom.. anything that sounds simple and strong will be successful.
www.poak.net
Imagine:
The problem is that Network Solutions was (and still is) a private (only) for-profit company. They sought to relax all the requirements between org, com, & net tld's and then *sold* as many of them as they could. Instead of the domain naming system acting to help people find or create things on the Internet, we have the majority of domain names going unused, having been secured by individuals and companies hoping to profit just as NSI did with their original sale. (And NSI gets yearly rent.) It is very unfortunate that the company put in charge of domain name registration many years ago was a profit-driven company. Somebody pocketed a lot of money for that to have happended.
It has been a little over a year ago since registrar competition was introduced. But it is much too late to fix this system. The whole thing should be scrapped and new domains should be given out much like vanity license plates -- you can't sell yours to another: if you don't want it or use it, it goes back to the state to be reused. And NSI should have nothing to do with it.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Yes! We really need this TLD! Maybe it is different for non-european people. But for us it is much easier to trust a .be/.nl/... (or other european domain) e-commerce site, than a .com site that could be anywhere in the world where our justice system doesn't reach. But for a somebody with a good idea, it is a tedious and expensive business to go out and buy all European country domains. It is also impossible as for example a .be domain can only be purchased by Belgian people who own their own business. A .eu domain could change this, and I think this is very important. An important concern is the manner in which those new domain names will be assigned. Anybody with a good proposal? Chris. http://www.vandenberghe.org ---- 24 hours in a day...24 beers in a case...coincidence?
no.
In fact, to keep things more intuitive and descriptive, one would need to do:
something.uk.eu, giving rise to unneeded extraneous data '.eu'.
It's nice though... but that's what apeals to politicians.
:)
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The DNS is not being used appropriately.
It's a heirarchical system that has been abused by the registrars to the point where it's effectively a flat naming system; *.com.
End users should not have access to domains above 3rd or 4th level. First, second and maybe even the third level domains should be reserved exclusively for domain administration purposes. Think of it as a filing system. Would you allow users to randomly create directories off root or /usr or even /home? No. You administer that heirarchy and create areas where users can create and access information.
The DNS needs to be re-organised or even just organised. ICANN and the registrars should design the heirarchy rather than completely abdicating responsibility and allowing chaos to ensue.
A properly designed heirarchy would allow everyone to have their place without all this domain squatting and trademark infringement bullshit.
The new TLDs and the .eu TLD will simply cause more chaos. They will not solve anything. Do you really think that the IBMs, Microsofts and Apples of this world will not simply register their name in every existing TLD? They can and will.
Deleted
Well, acctualy "European Currency Unit" was just made up by the French in order to get the ECU name into non-french ppl's "hearts". Ecu is an old, even very old, French currency, and someone there simply thought it would be nice of them to influence EU with a bit of French class.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
The EU is not a country. EU is not in ISO 3166. Indeed, EU could never be put in ISO 3166 under the current rules.
If the EU was able to get a country code despite not being a country, it could potentially set a precedent which would allow the creation of a very large number of new TLDs "by the back door".
My feelings are the same. While I feel that we must be in the EU at the moment and that ultimately, there will be Europe (and maybe one day global) wide unification, I think that the current administration is leading us on a road to hell, increasing hatred and mistrust between its member nations rather than promoting harmony and unity. The way I see it, there's going to be a lot of bloodshed and the administration wil collapse into the rubble and then hopefully, a truly collaborative partnership can be realised which doesn't incorporate all the corruption, backstabbing and politicking that the body which is the current EU stands for.
Rich
sigh - a lot of large corporates do this.
.com as showing off their multi-national empire.
.au,.uk or whatever as it shows a pride in their country of origin, and think .com (or whatever) makes the company seem uninterested in its heritage.
They see
Personally I love to see the
They're american tlds, which we let you use. You have the option of using your country code, whereas in the US that's a more difficult process.
Of course, you don't WANT to use your country code, due to a combination of being too lazy and wanting to ride on the prestige of the US naming convention. The same combination of laziness and sheep-like following of American ideas that resulted in us inventing all of this instead of you, ironically.
I would suggest, if anyone would listen, that you propose changing the lameness filter to apply only to anonymous posts. That way OOG_THE_CAVEMAN could continue to provide us with his insightful comments here at slashdot.
Censorship is bad enough when applied by people. But when it is applied with machines it is just plain bad ... IT'S LIKE 1984 MAN!
sort of
:wq
The DNS heirarchy is total anarchy at the moment. Someone needs to put a little thought into a structure which will meet future needs.
.com, .net, .org (and all the new ones that'll appear soon) simply will no longer do.
A flat
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I can't blame the US for assuming the .com etc. TLD's. It a bit like England and postage stamps - from what I'm aware, England is the only country that doesn't put the name of the country on the stamp itself - but they invented them as we know it, so why did they need to originally?
This is the same as the US and the most commonly known TLD's. The US came up with the whole idea in the first place....
I have a US domain name. You know how much I paid to register it three years ago? $10. You know how much I've paid since then? Zilch. Nothing.
Not bad. I'm paying $10 a year for my nice TLD. OpenSRS rocks!
I think the only conclusion that can be made is that the whole naming system is totally screwed and there really isn't any way to fix it. Everyone wants IPv6 and that will take years (if not decades) to complete. Not everyone will want a new naming system (in fact quite a few people won't): you think that anyone will be able to fix it anytime this century?
Don't believe me? Check out their registrar site http://www.nic.int/
That's right. Even the root page on the registrars web site requires a mysterious password. And cypherpunks/cypherpunks does not work.
I guess they think they're 5UP3R 31337, eh?
Think of it like techno stamp collecting.
But if some country I haven't received hits from only has sites in the .eu domain there won't likely be a way to figure this out (although I think I have all of Europe at this point).
And it's less filling!
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Telstra wants to be part of the "eRevolution" and decided to drop the .au off of telstra.com.au (or bigpond.com.au) and wants everyone to ignore the fact that its Australian. telstra.com? Bleh.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
you.to
Got Rhinos?
pico.de/gallo
Got Rhinos?
The WIPO's FAQ about ICANN and domain name arbitration can be found here.
Do a search on 'ICANN'. Sorry for not including the final link, but they use frames.
Wouldn't they insist on the .ue suffix, since the union's name in French must be Union Europeane (sp?) or something like that? Or have they finally come to their senses? No, that can't be true...
I have made it my quest to get 31337.int. Then I will be truly cool.
The *.com namespace could be a little less crowded if three U.S. states were to open up domains to outsiders. If the State of Colorado opened up its domain registration process, we'd have *.co.us like the Brits have *.co.uk. Then get Oregon to do it, and nonprofits (*.or.us) can jump in. ISPs can come in on Nebraska's domain (*.ne.us).
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld.htm
.eu could set some interesting precidents.
The codes IANA uses are two-letter codes from the ISO 3166 standard. IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country, nor what code letters are appropriate for a particular country.
.com IS a country.
"In money we trust".
"You can't make 'unfounded' accusations against a company. If we say you did it, you must present evidence as to otherwise yourself. You're considered guilty until proven not to."
'Work of an employee is company's property (as is the employee btw.)
etc...
When Tuvalu sold off .tv , one of my bosses asked for us to get a domain in that space (id.tv), where it matched one of our trademarks (idtv, a local digital television service).
We were told: auction, starting at us$10k. Sorry, no. Not interested.
Adding a TLD is a good money-spinner, but it doesn't make much sense: getting the existing space re-organised (yes, I know, painful idea) would be so much more beneficial IMHO
... and today's pet project has
Boy now weren't most of those international domains? For your info, the US top domain is.... (drumroll please) .us! The fact that almost noone uses it makes .com a US domain just as much as the fact that .se is hardly used by swedish companies makes .com a swedish domain.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
The company I am working with uses the messy fix of .com for the US sites and .one.com for European sites.
-----------------------------
-----------------------------
If you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
They were never intended to "help people locate sites". They were intended to be a convenient name for a physical machine somewhere out there.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
US domains?????????? I don't think so
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I AGREE, OOG. Will BLOW SOME KARMA to SHOW MY SUPPORT. I also do not think OOG is a troll. (An all bold filter would be much more useful.) Caps are like yelling, but THEY ARE NOT. They are caps. Easily moderated down if the content is not liked. I can understand the 70 second rule, but this is ridiculous. I've recommended this before, but a fractional point system where each moderator gets about 25 one-fifth Troll points to apply would solve much of Trolling. Five people with moderation would have to agree a post is a Troll. Then it would get moderated down 1 point. Easy cake. Filtering of what gets posted is simple censorship. I thought that was what moderation was suppose to avoid -- censorship. :(
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
All well and good and I believe this was recently considered at the secret illuminati meeting for which the recent WTO conference in Seattle was just a cover. It was rejected on the grounds of the confusion and cost to corporations that would ensue. However, a functionally equivalent alternative was decided on.
Welcome to the planet "com"
Rich
Exactly. They're more like street addresses. True, a few companies can manage "Canda House" or even (as here in Basingstoke) "Wella Rd" but generally, most will have to settle for "29 Generic St" or suchlike. If you want to find a company, you go to a directory. Problem is, there is no standard directory on the web (Yahoo comes close) and for actually finding things, search engines are somewhat hit or miss. I don't have any answers but some kind of non-hierarchical, distributed system is needed but with the way browsers work, it would mean rewriting gethostbyname for every OS out there.
Rich
We got our own domain folks! We must be important! Perhaps the Euro will stop heading for the basement now.
Were it not for those profiteering bastards at NSI, people would have used the .US domain, and we wouldn't have this whole damn domain name squatting controversy. Say I owned a store with a terribly cliched name -- let's make it the "New Leaf Bookstore." And we'll say I'm in Olympia, Washington. I'm www.newleaf.olympia.wa.us. Say there's a totally unrelated New Leaf bookstore in Tacoma. They're www.newleaf.tacoma.wa.us. How hard is that? You gotta remember a city instead of a com, org, or net. Then apply the related state and dot-us. That would SEVERELY cut down on the quibbling. Sure, there would still be a problem between me and the guy who owns the new leaf health store in Olympia, but that's a hell of a lot less of a problem than every New Leaf bookstore, health store, grain refinery and horticulture joint fighting over newleaf.com (out of curiosity, I looked it up -- turns out to be a "community market").
Remember fraud and misrepresentation laws still apply -- someone couldn't register newleaf.lubbock.tx.us and claim to be me. More over, squatting wouldn't be profitable because A) lubbock obviously isn't me and B) They'd have to buy thousands of domain names, not just three.
Moreover, the entire co-op way the US domain is put together should appeal to the hacker ethic -- there's no giant corporation holding all the strings, each region (i.e. olympia) is done by someone in the community who elected to do it. Like I said, I paid a one-time ten buck fee, but I'm in LA (california) -- lots of regions don't charge a dime. The workload is distributed.
But no, big money prevailed over reason, prices were inflated and service dissipated.
I urge you all to at least LOOK at the .us system and understand its beauty before you run off and buy a shiny new dot-com. Pisses me off when sites bounce my email address as "not a valid email address" 'cos the dumbass site admin has never heard of .us.
Whew! Bitterness vented. I thank you.
-- r . m o s q u i t o --
Unless, of course, you live in a certain northern member country in which the directives are taken as the word of God by the administration.
Yeah, those damn Dutch! Oh! you mean the English.
Yes, Prime Minister put it something like this:
"The Germans love it, the French ignore it, the Spanish and Italians are too chaotic to enforce it" (This isn't an exact quote. They managed to include all the European countries)
There shouldn't be any; .nato was a TLD formed on the whim of one Mark Pullen at DARPA, before nato.int was sorted out. No subdomains were allocated and it should have died out by now.
http://www.netplanet.org/i-files/file 001.html (German)
Here's hoping the .eu registers enforce some kind of rule to stop all the domains being instantly sold to the foul parasitic domain brokers that have so royally fucked up the existing namespace, charging stupid prices for what was once a public good.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
I currently abuse the moderation system as much as possible. I do it because I can and it'll hasten the change to an improved system.
Problem: Too many moderators with too many points.
It's far too easy to become a moderator at the moment.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
shouldn't that be Britain ? Besides, sterling is not currently overvalued, check it;s value against the dollar or the yen and it's fine - it's only overvalued against the euro because the euro is going down faster than an intern on bill clinton. That said it seems to have caught itself now so maybe it'll go up again.
rover crisis would not be as dangerous as it is
Personally I don't see the loss of a car manufacturer that has demonstrated over the years a stunning ability to make cars that people don't want and another ability to not make any profit whatsoever as a particularly bad thing.
True, the ecu is underrated at the moment
Underrated ? it's simply a weak currency cause they let any old dodgy economy join and then don't have control over tax rates and cash relief over those economies. Until they reorganise the EU along lines of a single monetary source and single controlling authority it'll never work - and that'll be a long time in coming because of the nationalistic aspects to iron out.
J
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
I agree completely that the current DNS system is a total mess. However, no matter how bad it is, it's too late to be changed, because its use is entrenced too deeply by now. The only hope is that a completely new system running parallel to the old one will be invented that is good enough to eventually replace the onld one in direct competition. But I wouldn't hold my breath...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
In short the 2 letter domain has to appear in ISO 3166-1, which is in turn based on the UN Statistical servises lists. eu does not appear as a 'country or teritory' in either.
Have a look at their report on asigning the .pl TLD to Palestine
think of all the .edu or .eu confusion!
fuck.eu
would .com be so popular if it didn't sound like it does?
~ppppppppö
But imagine that every US state had its own TLD with no common TLD; then you'd have www.microsoft.wa, www.redhat.nc (or is that www.redhat.sc?), www.nytimes.ny, and so on. It'd be completely messy -- you would have to remember for every company where it's based, and companies based in several states would have to settle on one TLD as the primary one.
That's how it is in Europe: It a common market, so it's becoming increasingly irrelevant where a company or organisation is based, and very often there simply is no good choice -- hence the European Union has to use .eu.int, and most companies prefer .com domains.
For large monolithic states like the USA, India, the European Union, or China, country codes may make some sense, but I really think that it would be better to abolish this country-based system.
If you really want to distinguish between geographic entities, it can easily be done as e.g. eu.redhat.com vs. us.redhat.com or eu.parl.gov vs. us.parl.gov vs. zh.parl.gov.
Heh. Looks like Katz's annoying ' == ? script got applied to Timothy by mistake. I'm gonna get my Squadron of Psycho Midgets to go fix it now.
I thought the .eu will be parallel to .uk and others. It's a new TLD, not a replacement.
So something.uk will exist, whereas you could also have something.eu for more international needs.
The Euro is a new, single currency, that effectively replaced this old non-currency, so a new name was needed.
So, by pushing the name ECU in the first place for the old "currency", they actually lost it when the Euro replaced it.
Claus
I'm sure that they are thinking - 'lets give the companies an alternative TLD to use'. Unfortunately, if I was a EU company, I would still register the .com, .net and .org TLDs anyway, so this doesn't really reduce domain squatting at all does it?
.com needs a business license, .net an ISP license, and .org a non-profit organisation license. So I really had no choice but to register on the .org TLD for my own use...
I guess they could prevent it in the EU TLD by imposing crazy rules to actually register a domain, like here in Hong Kong, myself as an individial, I can't even register a domain,
I thinking the same thing is going to happen with this EU TLD from the looks of it. Maybe the EU TLD will be 'cleaner' in the sense that so many people won't squat in it, but by no stretch of the imagination is it going to improve the situation with the worldwide TLDs (and yes, they are WORLDWIDE, NOT AMERICAN TLDs...which so many people seem confuse them for).
I strongly disagree with having a lameness filter. The notion of pre-judging a comment based on the ratio of capital to lower-case letters is just an excess restriction we don't need. A moderation system is in place, and although it is biased because it is based upon input of humans(the moderators on $3 crack don't help either) it at least isn't the total knee-jerk reaction of machine moderation. If any of the last few stories is any indication of the result on the amount of trolls, I would have to say it is increasing the troll posts, not decreasing. this is as offtopic as it gets, but i know it is blocking the poster who i find gives the most insightful commentaries in /. threads, OOG_THE_CAVEMAN, and since this system has made him uncapable of speaking up for himself without changing the very nature of his posts. please, cast your vote for OOG and mail rob about getting this bug fixed.
Don't be mean or my friend Oog will smash your head
Just a thought, since they're breaking it up and the Europeans don't like them ...
It's not like anyone's using it, after all.
Will in Seattle
No, that's just our politicians!
j.
Absit Invidia
I don't mean to be a troll but isn't this up to ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)?
To quote their about page:
I'm all for people/countries agreeing (including the EU folks) but as I understand it without ICANN or maybe IANA playing along, this doesn't mean much.
Yes, I'm aware that the article says:
but that says nothing about ICANN supporting this decision. It just says they are going to uses the guidelines that ICANN reccomend.I don't mean to piss anyone off but as I understand it, the internet is still largely American due to it's roots in ARPA and that most "authorities" on the internet are American.
Citrix
Leknor
http://Leknor.com
"So many idiots, so few comets"
Boy now weren't most of those international domains?
Interesting question. From back in the day, I thought that they were all US only. (And it's pretty believable that the US would have an ego like that, isn't it?) But RFC1591 and IANA seem to agree with you. .com, .org, and .net are all intented to be international in nature.
To save you a click, IANA says:
But you can find plenty of people that state or imply that .com is for US commercial interests, so I don't feel too bad for being confused.
Oh well. I'm going to try to get myself registered as a .int just for the hell of it.
I'd better go register linux.eu . No more of the problems we got into when http://www.linux.nl was suddenly registered by a company.
ICANN doesn't necessarily allocate TLDs only by country. Many territories of countries get one too: step forward Jersey, Guernsey, CoCos Islands, etc.
ICANN, who say they are not in the business of determining what is or is not a country, gets its two-letter TLD names from the INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS ORGANIZATION 3166 group.
They have agreed that Europe gets its own TLD. ICANN merely has to ratify it. http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/new02 _00.html
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they make as they fly by
.eu means European Union, not Europe. It would not cover those countries in Europe that aren't in the Union, so it can't be considered geographic.
.eu.com? .eu.org? It just looks messy. .gov.eu makes a lot more sense.
What ccTLD would you suggest for the EU parliament?
But you can find plenty of people that state or imply that .com is for US commercial interests.
.com sites. However, down here in France everybody, and especially companies wants a .com domain rather than a .fr one, possibly because it sounds more "professional". There's also the fact that if you simply type "foo", most browsers will try to reach "www.foo.com" but not "www.foo.fr". I guess it's the same in other countries, and so we have that stupid *.com flat hierarchy
Yep, not surprising since USofAers are unlikely to visit non-US
Okay. So they've run out of .coms. Easy answer: set up a new top level domain.
.com or .co.uk or .de addresses already will simply buy the equivalent .eu address as well. Once the initial buying boom has settled, all the same names will be taken by the same companies for the same sites. The only difference will be that all the DNS servers around the world will need an upgrade.
.com) are organisations which are geographically fixed, but the internet's biggest asset is the way it breaks down geographical boundaries.
.org, and such. The newly liberated .tv would have been another good step in the right direction if they hadn't gotten greedy (although I think your average tv company can afford it). Now we need things like .fun, .shop, .news, and so on.
Nope. Sorry, it won't work.
The trouble here is that all those companies with
The solution is not to set up more and more geographical domains. Consider: The only people who really want those (rather than
The solution is to have type-based domains, rather than locality-based. We already see this with
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
One point often made when discussing the new domain (or domains like .shop, .bank, ...) is, that it will make it easier for companies with simmilar names to have "nice and short" domain-names, so that one takes smith.com and the other smith.eu....
.xx they can get their hands on and will sue everyone who has registered this domain before...
But the big-ones will just register their name in every
As long as people do not understand, that there is such a thing like www.de.company.com (instead of company.de) or www.company.com/de or www.company.de/product (instead of e.g. www.hp2000.com for HP's 2000-Printer) this just makes no sense....
Everybody knows the big US domains (.com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov). And anybody halfway with it knows about country codes too. (.de, .uk, etc.)
Additionally, most old timers remember when .mil addresses used to be more common (and often used, too!), and some of use even remember the old .arpa addresses. And the European Union currently has a .int address. But has anybody found a .nato address? In theory, the exist, but the closest I've ever come has been the NATO home page.
I agree. I think .eu could also be a political thing...be part of a greater nation(-like) thing and not struggle in fights against others... as europe always did.
The Euopean Union tonight unanimously agreed to create the toplevel internet domain ".eu". Our France correspondant went on record stating "Ewww!". Puzzling isn't it?
Elsewhere around the globe the United Guatamala Hegemony is going to lobby for the toplevel domain ".ugh", while the Urguay National Federation plans on aquiring ".unf".
Sources close to the Micronesia Open Organization say they would enjoy ".moo" but it looks like they would be turned down as they aren't big enough to aquire it, unlike the Hundouras Organization of Tribbles who want ".hot" and the Guam Rightously Inspired Troll Service who want ".grits".
-- iCEBaLM
Euro, not ECU (wich stood for european currency unit).
Parents Against Kuro5hin
Should revoke all domains. Then, give away domains _only_ if it is suitable (HP can't buy fuzzyanimals.com, Anonymous Loser can't buy ilikemypenis.com as there'd be a .prsnl (Personal)). Country code domains would be organized by geographical location in a similar way compared to the .ca system (if I bought a domain, it would be blah.pickering.on.ca).
Com, Org, and Net would be in chaos for a while, but eventually, our system wouldn't be so fucked up.
When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
http://eu-hq.u.nu/
Is this for real?
I'm not sure, but i think 'ecu' was dropped beacause it seems like 'cow' (in Holland?).
Also. ECU rhymes with 'ass' in Portuguese.
Can you imagine what kind of jokes wold be arround if it was the 'ecu' going down?
Euro was a much safer bet for the future of Europe.
Thats probably more why they want Europe to have some control over the .com/.net/.org names. A .eu name still isn't going to be as sexy as a .com
Maybe I read wrong but I think that for American corporations to grab up .eu domains will be pretty difficult. GOOD. I think domain squatting sucks, and am still pretty sore about the fog around .com, .net and .org....they MEAN something, and should have been regulated to retain that meaning. Yes, more TLDs! .art, .pol (politics), .xxx (let's face it, it's there); whatever it takes to help wade through the billions of sites all competing for ONE .com name. We end up having to add characters and make the names too long for anybody to remember or type correctly (I worked on one a couple years back, www.stephenseuropeanbakery.com, holy crap that's a mouthful). It's just another headache for us web designers...as if browser wars and clients who want Flash movies of their dogs isn't enough. .com ending, and most folks still give you weird looks when you say .org, but with advertising you can change that; and as more folks hop online it will become easier to do. :-)
Yes, I realize that the public is pretty tuned in to the
</rant>
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I'd like to see the back of the .co.uk domain (replace it with just .uk) and either a rule that when you buy (name.TLD) you get (name.<all TLDs other than MIL>) as part of the package or that any one organisation/person can only be own one domain.
Neither would work very well, but then neither does the current system.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"