.eu Domain Names Top 2.5M in Year One

VictoryDone writes "More than 2.5 million ".eu" Internet addresses have been registered since the European domain name launched just over a year ago. Many worldwide brands — from companies like Air France and Versace to environmental campaigners Greenpeace — now have a ".eu" address, officials said, singling out non-European brands Sony Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp.'s Lexus for also choosing an ".eu" address in ad campaigns."

Comments

What's the point

[Silver Sloth]

The only reason I care about a tld is when I'm shopping. For us Brits Amazon.co.uk has lower shipping costs and a faster delivery time than Amazon.com where the goods have to come all the way from the USA. As such I look for .uk tld names to ensure that they are in the same country as me.

Without wishing to get involved in flame wars about whether the EU is a good thing or not, for the sort of on-line shopping I do membership of the EU is not really relevant.

Re:What's the point

[meringuoid]

Without wishing to get involved in flame wars about whether the EU is a good thing or not, for the sort of on-line shopping I do membership of the EU is not really relevant.

If you buy CDs it is. The CD-WOW lawsuit established that they can't ship cheap CDs and DVDs here from Hong Kong like they used to, but they can from EU nations. The CD sold by the record cartel in Slovenia is identical to the one sold in England, but a whole lot cheaper.

Registration restrictions

[sakdoctor]

"The registrants must be located within the EU"

Are regulations ever enforced? A little off topic maybe, but yesterday I almost registered a .us domain name.
As I was about to check out I got a different screen to normal. It said that I had to be a business with links to the US,
it also mentioned "all your personal information are belong to (.)us".

Researching it futher I found a right shocker. Swedish (and some others I don't remember) domains often have to pay to change DNS servers. Your rights for a particular domain differ quite a bit with each tld.

Re:Registration restrictions

[Anonymous Coward]

If I recall correctly, you need to either be a citizen of a European state or you need to have a company with an office located in a European state.

Longest .eu domain name

[Arleo]

The Welsh village with the longest name in the UK is also one of the few domain names that uses all possible 63 characters allowed for a .eu domain name. Check it out at http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllan tysiliogogogochuchaf.eu

Re:Pointless

[aslate]

Hmmn, idea forming. If i were to go to http://slashdot/ i should get all the sites registered at slashdot.tld appear as a list, perhaps with a small preview thumbnail/description. That way i could plainly see that http://www.ati.co.uk/ isn't the site i want whereas http://www.ati.com/ must contain a UK section (under /uk).

I am starting to get to a stage where i'm not sure which TLD i need. With two banks i have online banking facilities. However one has http://www.nationwide.co.uk/ whereas the .com is a US site. The other uses/advertises/redirects to http://www.natwest.com/ (although in this case .co.uk works too).

Re:Pointless

[mccalli]

country-based tld's are only there because of nationalism, every country wanted one...

Nope. Take a look at, say, Apple. Here's http://apple.com - familiar, right? Here, on the other hand, is http://apple.co.uk - rather different. Within the UK, Apple Design have the rights to use it. Within the US, it's Apple Inc. that have the right. This isn't a bug or nationalism, it's a feature. I like location-specific URLs. I don't use google.com for example, I use google.co.uk.

Cheers,
Ian

Re: What else did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

.cat is not for catalan pages in general, but for pages concerning their language.