Over 1 Million .eu Domains and Counting

gavint writes "In the first 12 hours since "Landrush" registration of .eu Domains begun at 11:00 CET, over 1 million have been registered. Predictions of .eu becoming the second biggest domain after .com look like they may become true, with Nominet being responsible for "over four million" .uk domains, the second biggest namespace. The UK initially led the way during Landrush but have since been overtaken by Germany, with over a quarter of all registered domains. Meanwhile many "Sunrise" period applications where businesses are able to protect domains where they hold a prior right remain unprocessed, although these domains cannot be registered yet during Landrush. Over 1,000 registration agents were only allowed one connection each to EURid's servers in order to prevent problems and ensure fairness."

Comments

.eu is useless, it's a domain DMZ

[Peter Cooper]

A lot of companies who have no legal rights in the European Union, like Flickr, FeedBurner, and, well, just pick 1000 names out of a hat.. have already been domain squatted on .eu. Even my own little web tool has had its domain name registered. To be honest, I'm surprised, as .eu names aren't cheap. .eu is a back-water. It'll have a small cluster of EU related domains that might be popular, but otherwise it's just another demilitarized zone where people register domains to be 'protected' but never actually use them.

I don't see any good reason for anyone to bother with a .eu name. .eu patriotism isn't great enough to warrant it, it's confusing to new users, and many in the UK look at the EU with disdain anyway.

I imagine .eu will be of primary use to companies with an overall (continental) European presence, but who's that? I can't even think of a single grocery store that's in more than two EU countries, let alone anything else.

linux.eu

[quantiz]

I see a "Linus Torvalds" individual for linux.eu. Is Torvalds himself? The registration is located in Germany... If Linus then why through Germany?