.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."

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?

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...

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...

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.

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) [guttmacher.org] is the most popular sexually transmitted disease. The real reason companies like mine have registered .EU domains is to defend against cyber-squatting.

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.

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