.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

And how many people actually used it?

[mwvdlee]

I live in the EU and can honestly say that I haven't tried typing a single .eu domain name yet, nor have I seen them in ads or links.

Re:And how many people actually used it?

[rudegeek]

FWIW they are quite popular for personal uses. Quite a few people I know got lastname.eu because they couldn't get .com/.net/.org -- so most of this sites are blogs, FOSS projects and the like. Companies who got .eu are probably using it just as an alias.

Re:And how many people actually used it?

[squaretorus]

I keep being asked to register .eu domains for people, but they never want to use them for anything new, just to stop others from using them. It would be interesting to see some stats on how many have unique content. I'd guess under 2%

Re:And how many people actually used it?

[CastrTroy]

Sounds like America (Canada and the US) to me :). I find it funny that whenever we want tasty food, we go to an Indian, Chinese, Thai, French, Italian restaurant. Or when we want "arts", we go to an Italian opera, or look at French art. . People flock to other countries to eat their food, see their architecture, and art. I'm from Canada, and I find it kind of weird that we have no culture of our own. Maybe it's just because I'm from Canada, and so it just seems like regular life, and not culture, but does anyone else find America devoid of it's own culture?

This isn't much used.

[koreaman]

I live in France, and have since September. I interact with French people every day. I have never seen or heard of a .eu address, and didn't even know they existed until reading this Slashdot article.

Re: What else did you expect?

[Adhemar]

The .eu tld is just a money-raising exercise, nothing more

I know quite a number of individuals who have their own .eu domain, and prefer that over a domain with their country's TLD for political reasons: because they do not identify themselves too proudly as a citizen of their country.

There are several peoples with some degree of autonomist and secessionist movements in Europe:

• Flanders from Belgium
• Brittany and Corsica from France
• Basque and Catalonia from Spain (however the latter have already the .cat TLD)
• and many others...

EDU spoofs

[Monoman]

How many of the EU registrations are clear attempts to catch typos looking for an EDU domain traffic. Some are just typo squatters and some are looking for more ...

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=1866

Re:Pointless

[Rocketship Underpant]

While your point is excellent, that purpose still might be better served with "us.apple" and "uk.apple". In that case, it would be up to Apple how finely to divide up their regional websites. They might decide to build wales.apple and scotland.apple, for example. In addition to ca.apple, they could have qc.apple for Canada's French region.