Europeans have rushed to grab a virtual home in cyberspace, says the BBC.
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for new .eu domain name since it became available to the public on Friday, according to the BBC News report. It says that the new .eu domain name will become second only to .com in terms of importance and the volume of traffic that the best .eu domains are likely to attract.
Applications have already been coming in at high volumes:
[…] According to the .eu administrator Eurid, German and British net users account for most of the domain name applications. British registrants made up 236,573 by late afternoon, just behind Germany with 237,928. In third place were the Dutch with 125,426 applications.
I’m now among this group (although as a Brit in The Netherlands, which category would I be in?) as I’ve just registered nevillehobson.eu.
According to the European Commission, the .eu domain will assume special signficance from May:
The EU institutions’ entire web site (Europe’s largest single site), and all their officials’ e-mail addresses, will be switched over to .eu on 9 May, Europe Day. Old and new addresses will continue to work side-by-side for at least one year, after which only “.eu†names will be used.
If you’re resident in an EU member state, you can apply for an .eu domain name. Details from Eurid.
Or do what I did – use GoDaddy (or any one of the accredited registrars) and see if the domain you want is available. If it is, and you satisfy the EU residency requirement, you’ll have your shiny new .eu domain.
5 responses to “EU domain takes off”
Rivstart för .eu…
Idag blev domänen .eu fri att registrera domännamn under för vem som helst. Över en halv miljon webbadresser gick åt berättar Wired. De flesta registreringarna kom från Sverige, Storbritannien, Tyskland, Holland och Belgien.
Det lÃ¥ter onekligen…
May be I’m just blind (or I’m using the wrong search terms), but I can’t find it anywhere:
When will these domains actually work? Or is it that BT’s name server hasn’t caught up yet? When I try any .eu domain (incl nevillehobson.eu) I don’t get anywhere so far.
Armin, I registered mine yesterday afternoon, less than 24 hours ago. If I go to the URL right now, I get a ‘server not found’ error. According to GoDaddy (the registrar I use), anyone registering a new .eu domain might need to wait for 24-48 hours before it becomes effective.
They say: “This is due to the number of networks involved, and the fact that several different agencies control those networks. This delay applies to all domains and all registrars.”
Seems to really take some time then. I had expected some of the names which I assume were registered during the sunrise period to work already.
I tried several of the big names like volkswagen, bmw, daimlerchrysler, shell and the like, none of them work yet. Neither do http://www.polo.eu and http://www.discovery.eu which are mentioned in the BBC report. The three countries in Great Britain don’t go anywhere either (haven’t checked if and to whom they’re registered yet).
Some German efficiency though: http://www.bayern.eu and http://www.bremen.eu work for me already ;-)
I’d expect some German efficiency here, Armin :)
Probably some jiggery-pokery with DNS, I imagine. For instance, the bayern.eu site displays bayern.de on some pages.
Interesting to see how the net copes with the strain, what with the flood of new registrations being processed.