I noticed an advertisement on TV last with a .eu url therefore I just had to have a look at www.blackanddecker.eu/
They seem to be using this as their central contact point with all other domain extensions being in their specific regions and their .com as US only. It looks as though the .com is not quite as up-to-date with links as most of the European sites.
The first of many to come maybe?
Regards...jmcc
personally, I think within time and given time it will become the second most used Tld next to .com , even out stripping .net ...
I'm not sure you can measure and gauge the development of .eu based on the experiences that have passed and been in place as the EU itself is still developing ..I've spent the last week running spiders that were checking approximately 2.14M .eu domains and verifying how many were active and how many had websites.
personally, I think within time and given time it will become the second most used Tld next to .com , even out stripping .net ...I don't share your optimism. The .eu is quickly turning into a swamp. I don't trust EURid's statistics as EURid has lied before (about the squatting/warehousing problem and phantom registrars issues during the landrush).
EURid will have to be stripped of the administration of the .eu ccTLD for any real growth to occur. The massive squatting and cyberwarehousing problems will not be resolved until someone seriously larts the European Commission and strips EURid of any responsibility for .eu ccTLD.
At the moment most businesses in Europe do not give a damn for .eu - it is considered an irrelvant backwater extension. What I have noticed, looking at approximately 300K dropped .eu domains) was that a significant number were business type domains being dropped by businesses that had their .com or ccTLD.
The .eu ccTLD is simply not a trustworthy extension for business or for the EU.
Regards...jmcc
Portal and redirector sites do not really count.
Don't you think so?
Personally I feel this is a great example of precisely how I've been considering setting-up our various global sites, however the most significant factor is that it uses the .eu as the main site and uses all other extensions like sub-domains including .com.
Forgetting the money aspect of .com I wonder why more US companies do not use .us? We do and it works very well for us.
Is it simply the .com/net/org historical factor?
I think within time and given time it will become the second most used Tld next to .com
My gut instinct tells me eventually it will be in the top half dozen or so along with .cn, .de and .in however as large as the business market is in the EU I do not feel that there are enough businesses capable of a pan-European sales and delivery mechansism that would warrant them purporting to be such a business.
After all, I know many small UK businesses turning over STG 5-10 million (USD 10-20 million) that only work within their local catchment area or county and would find it nearly impossible to recruit the necessary qualified staff to expand beyond those boundaries.
Why do I say that? I just happen to be advising precisely such a business like this right now and it's an untter nightmare for them trying to do business merely some 100 miles (160 kms) away and they have been established 100 years with a great management and production team.
At the moment most businesses in Europe do not give a damn for .eu
Unfortunately I feel for the next 3-5 years you may be correct however I did notice at the French Open last week several baseball caps all sporting a .eu extension!
Is .eu just going to become the European marketing extension for low-cost .cn and .in products...ohhh...controversial!
Don't you think so?No. Because it is not really a natural development of the ccTLD. A ccTLD is a somewhat different animal from a TLD like .com or .net. The natural development comes from people and companies creating sites branded primarily with .eu - these are the .eu pureplays. It is a sign that people and businesses have enough confidence in the ccTLD to use it as their primary brand and there is enough public awareness of the ccTLD in its target market. The .eu ccTLD fails on both those points. The EU itself is associated with fraud, waste and useless bureaucracy.
The usage of the national ccTLDs and the .com dwarves the .eu usage. With Irish websites, according to EURid, there are around 27K .eu domains registered. However on Irish hosters, there are only 6K or so detected. Marchex and a few other domain aggregators have front companies here accounting for thousands of "Irish" .eu registrations. The UK is even worse - at least 200K of the UK .eu registrations belong to UK front companies operating as proxies for US and Canadian domain aggregators and squatters.
EURid incompetently manage the .eu ccTLD and have been responsible for a visibly corrupt and flawed Sunrise and Landrush phase. The main responsibility for the .eu ccTLD not being trustworthy lies with the management of that mickey mouse registry and the fools in the European Commission and its "expert" advisors that chose the EURid venture. Any competent management would have spotted what was going on and have taken action to stop the abuse and plunder of .eu ccTLD. It was action which it was fully entitled to take uner the regulations governing .eu ccTLD.
So the fish rots from the head down and people and businesses have long memories. They remember spending hundreds of Euros or Pounds to get their business name and finding that some muppet in PwC BE decided that their company name and all the paper work wasn't "sufficient" to prove entitlement. They remember seeing Chinese squatters (over 6K domains squatted and currently has the highest number of ADRs taken against it) or some Cyprus based front company hoover up their domains. Over 81% of UK and Irish firms did not get their business names because of these muppets and guess what - EURid pocketed at least 10M in fees from this little scheme.
Is .eu just going to become the European marketing extension for low-cost .cn and .in products...ohhh...controversial!As opposed to the linkswamp of PPC, parking pages and "coming soon" pages that it already is? :)
Regards...jmcc
At the moment
You can't just think in terms of what a domain extension is doing at the moment when there is a far bigger issue of the growth and integration of the EU still to be resolved..
It's kind of like the early USA in that we still can't decide on how many stars and stripes to add never mind getting us all to work together..
I believe it will and should and inevitably must happen it just makes business sense..
The same goes for EURid .. There was enough nonsense with .com for a number of years before some sort of domain resolution was put in place.. short memory ;-)
I remember the goldrush for .eu and offering the protection of legal proof of registered trademark.. a decent idea.. but it did not take in to account that some countries eg: Sweden, had much easier systems to register a TM and that is my point, until the business playing field levels off, anomalies are bound to happen.. even in the US now business law is different in different states...
The importance of .eu will then naturally follow.
[edited by: Lobo at 4:37 am (utc) on June 22, 2007]
Lets look at the .eu this way.....
Landrush has been and gone - phase over lets stop harping on about it...
The EU extension is not in the control of those second rate politicians sitting round a circle, its under the control of the domain owners - so who gives a flying s##t about any corruption in europe - cut the harping link.....between an internet extension and a group of politicians....
Domain owners are in full control, have you asked the average domain owner how long it takes them to build a site or even get around to looking at building a site on there domain property...?
Hell I am developing a business directory at present let me please elaborate "a top quality directory" your names not down your not coming in type lol and I can tell you there`s heaps of delays involved....so theres an answer to why sites dont just pop up 12 months after domain purchase....
Domain owners/ developers will be the driving force in the rise of the eu domain extension....my second site for developement is an absolute quality platform - region pacific and may even become one of the biggest of its type in the world....who knows.... :-)
my other 70 or 80 or so .eu domains are going to be sitting idle for sometime till I get less lazy or employ some drones....
Yes the numbers of registrations did drop around april, but has anybody noticed they have risen back up since....people dropping rubbish name reg`s and also dropping trademarked names....hell I dropped 3 myself....early morning registrations....but I also bought some domains other fools dropped because they relised they weren`t going to make a million in 12 months....
So please less negativity chill relax.....time will tell....
The success stories are coming but hey I am not going to give myself a heart attack to show you one..... websites will market the .eu extension... quality websites....
