Leosghost - 10:52 am on Apr 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

I have to question the use of such a suffix anyway ..as an EU citizen the sight of the .eu suffix appended to a domain name would certainly give me no additional cause to click on it as opposed to my motivation to click on a dot com , net etc ..

In fact I would actually be less inclined to "visit" as the chances are that the landing page language would be incomprehensible to me inspite of the fact that I can read reasonably well 5 languages ..

We have no standard use language as yet in the EU ( apart from those citizens who use English )...the web is for the most part in English ( and as was pointed out by a mod here recently ..posting is in English only on these fora ..for obvious reasons )..and although that language balance will change with the number of Chinese in particular coming on line in the future .. there certainly will be no "threat" to the predominace of English as the business language of the EU ..However it is not the language of the average citizen surfer ..

The population of Europe has very much less enthusiasm for the whole "european excercise" than than the politicians or civil servants of their respective countries ..( incedentally I am pro EU and pro the current proposed constitution ..having read it in 5 languages ..this is not a thinly disguised peice of anti EU PR ..just a recognition of the unhappy facts ) ...

Plus one is forced to ask .how the citeria for the acceptance of any website as being able to use the .eu suffix will be shaped ..for example in France one must be a registered business ( with the french government ) with all the costs that that entails to use a .fr..whereas in the Uk it is not necessary to be a business to use the .uk ..

If it is to be open to any one ..it will have "zero street cred" within the EU within 12 months ..as citizens who thought that made it in cornformity with their local country suffix laws ..learn otherwise ..In a similar way to the dot org situation ..we all know the "special" requirements we are required to read to register dot orgs ..we all know also that there are thousands and thousands that are pure profit making operations who either are masquerading as otherwise ..as "come ons" or to avoid local tax legislations ..or because the owners wanted the domain name and the dot com and dot net were gone ..but are still using it to sell "v**gra" etc ...and no sanctions are applied via the internet name authorities without actual complaints ..even then!

The coming existence of an .eu appears to be the result of a wishlist by politicians etc here in the EU..without reference to the fact that we actually have no real common cultural or legislative references between our member countries ..

The proposed constitution would not change the disparity between the requirements of countries to the rights to use the various individual country suffixes ..and therefore as such the widespread adoption of the .eu ( it is mentioned absolutely nowhere in the proposed constitution ..and is not covered by any currently "pan european law" ) by european businesses and websites is probably unworkable ..or at best will last until the first major cross EU border online scam ..and then the average EU citizen surfer will avoid it as suspect ..

edited more than once :)for speeling and clarity ..was doing something else at the same time as posting ..;)..multi-tasking isn't my strong point today

[edited by: tedster at 3:31 pm (utc) on April 23, 2005]