.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

Of course they got one

[Anonymous Coward]

You didnt expect them to sit there and let some cybersquatter take it, or worse a rival company did you?

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?

[Corporate Troll]

The people having the least problem feeling themselves as a "part of the EU" are those EU citizens that do not live in their own country. For most of my life, I have been a foreigner in the country I live and I had no problem identifying myself as a "European Citizen". Heck, I thought that it would be a good idea to drop all nationalities and call ourselves "Europeans". I still think that (but it will never happen), and now I have adopted the nationality of my host country.

I still am not a real national in the eyes of the people living here. My accent gives me away every single time. Heck, even parts of my in-laws family call me the "Dutch Guy" (albeit jokingly), even though I have never been Dutch. Sure, I speak Dutch, but I am not from the Netherlands.

Nationality is a tricky thing and personally, I feel as if I have none. European would be closest, even if my passport doesn't say so.

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?

[mwvdlee]

Cultures are created by people.
As long as those people think nationality is part of their culture, it is.

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?

Re:And how many people actually used it?

[CRCulver]

I find it funny that whenever we want tasty food, we go to an Indian, Chinese, Thai, French, Italian restaurant.

Plenty of classy steak joints and Tex-Mex restaurants around the U.S. That's mainly home-grown cuisine.

Or when we want "arts", we go to an Italian opera, or look at French art.

Plenty of American painters, photographers, and composers that are world famous. John Adams or Philip Glass operas tend to be just as successful as ones imported from Italy, and let's not forget that jazz was born in America.

People flock to other countries to eat their food, see their architecture, and art.

And plenty of people come to the U.S. from other countries to see the heartland of America, the remnants of hippie culture in San Francisco, or Hollywood dazzle in L.A. While the line between popular culture and legitimate high culture is often difficult to see in the U.S., the U.S. does indeed have it's own culture. Can't speak for Canada.

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:This isn't much used.

[JuanCarlosII]

I live in France, and have since September. I interact with French people every day.

... I have since been accepted into the group and having studied them in their natural habitat they appear to have developed a rudimentary form of communication, an advanced social hierarchy, and a range of basic emotions that make them seem almost human.

Re:This isn't much used.

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Although cordonbl.eu is already taken up, no Frenchman has yet bought p.eu

Re:This isn't much used.

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Also, sacrebl.eu is still wide open.

Unfortunately, some squatter has already grabbed pepelep.eu...

What else did you expect?

[ColdGrits]

Yet Another (pointless) .tld is launched.

Of COURSE major companies are going to buy their domain name - they can't risk cybersquatters, rivals or people with a grudge buying instead, so they have no option.

However, I can tell you that as someone who lives in an EU country, I have never ever seen anyone publish their .eu domain - companies are registeriung the domains, but they are just using their normal internationally-known existing ones.

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

BTW, I am willing to bet that a lot of the "good" names have already been snapped up by cybersquatters already. Which means the vast majority of domains are either squatters or companies keen to avoid being squatted. Which leaves VERY few "legitimate" .eu addresses in use...

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...

Re: What else did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Pointless Domain...

[owlnation]

I've lived in a few European countries since the launch of the .eu domain. As with other posters here, I've not seen one single website or link to anything .eu

Which is not a surprise since no-one speaks Europeaish. If you have a pan European organisation then you need to have sites language specific, and in most countries people are trained to type in .de or .fr or .it before they'd try anything else.

If you have a .eu site then you have to have either, 1. some sort of portal which is just a list of links to language specific content, which simply means your visitors have to click twice to get to the content they want, or 2. a redirect based on IP - which is seriously annoying - especially if you are not a speaker of the majority language in the country you are currently visiting, this can make it hard, or in fact impossible (hands up everyone who doesn't speak Hungarian), to navigate a page (Google, I'm looking at you, hang your heads in shame).

So I see the only value in having a .eu site as the following - 1. domain squatters, and 2. the few people who have a business name that ends in "eu" - neu, or bleu, or similar.

Re:Pointless Domain...

[TERdON]

Or you could just use the language indicated in the web browser settings. In this case using a country specific TLD doesn't really help in many cases - you'll still have the same problem in countries like Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc, where more than one language is spoken...

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

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

Most common IS NOT most popular

[giafly]

It has become the seventh most popular suffix worldwide

They mean "most common". Claiming .EU is popular because it has high uptake is like saying chlamidia tracomatis (PDF) is the most popular sexually transmitted disease. The real reason companies like mine have registered .EU domains is to defend against cyber-squatting.

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.