Recently in Eurid Category

Eurid, the registry operator for .eu, will be signing the .eu zone from tomorrow at 10am Central European Time.

They expect that the full signing of the zone will take about two hours to complete.

Eurid now have a YouTube channel and so far they've got three videos on there, which isn't a bad start.

The number of domain registries and registrars setting themselves up on Youtube and Facebook is constantly increasing, though only a very small number of organisations seem to really do anything more than pay lip service to the concepts.

Will the same happen with Eurid?

Here's their video to promote the ICANN meeting in Brussels in June:

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• Nominet To Release 1 and 2 Character Domain Names (isquattedyour.eu)

When .eu launched a couple of years ago all member states were given the chance to put names down on a "reserve list". The idea being that these names should only be registered either by the state or its organs.
Unfortunately some governments didn't take advantage of this, with the end result being that the .eu launch led to domains like cork.eu and dublin.eu being registered to organisations with questionable entitlements.

Later this year Eurid will be launching IDNs in .eu. In simple terms you'll be able to register domain names using characters other than standard ASCII - think accents, Cyrillic etc.,

And again, as .eu is run by the EU, governments were given ample opportunity to get names added to a reserve list.

However, the Irish government seems to have all but dropped the ball - again!

While other governments submitted large numbers of names, the Irish one seems to have restricted itself to IDN versions of "Ireland" and "Irish". What's even more insane is that they didn't even bother putting a block on the word "dáil", which is the Irish parliament!

Here's the list (excuse the formatting, but the copy and paste from a PDF didn't work too well):

1. irlanda
2. irsko
3. irland
4. iirimaa
5. ireland
6. irlande
7. irlanda
8. Īrija
9. Airija
10. Írország
11. L-Irlanda
12. iρλανδία
13. ierland
14. irlandia
15. Írsko
16. irska
17. irlanti
18. irland
19. .irlande
20. Ιρλανδία
21. irlande
22. republicofireland
23. eire
24. irelànd
25. irelánd
26. irelánd
27. irelánd
28. irelând
29. irelãnd
30. ireländ
31. irelånd
32. irelænd
33. irèland
34. iréland
35. irêland
36. irëland
37. ìreland
38. íreland
39. îreland
40. ireland
41. irelan•
42. irelañd
43. irelānd
44. irelănd
45. ireląnd
46. irelanď
47. irelanđ
48. irēland
49. irěland
50. irėland
51. iręland
52. irěland
53. ĩreland
54. īreland
55. ĭreland
56. įreland
57. ıreland
58. irelańd
59. irelaņd
60. irelaňd
61. irelaʼnd
62. irelaŋd
63. iŕeland
64. iŗeland
65. iřeland
66. ирландия

You can download the full PDF here

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• Putting The Accent Back Into Domains - IDNs In EU (blacknight.com)

According to a news alert I received last night, Eurid's contract to manage the .eu namespace has been renewed for a further 5 years.

The news, which appears to have either been broken or leaked at the Eurid registrar dinner last night in Mexico city appeared on a French domain news site, but has since vanished.

If anyone can confirm or deny this news it would be helpful

John McCormac has been collecting and processing statistics on domain registrations and hosting for as long as I can remember. He is probably best known for Hackwatch and WhoisIreland, which produces monthly reports for the Irish hosting and domain industry.

John's latest project has been in development for several months and offers an alternative to some of the existing domain statistics sites already on the market.

What makes it different is that HosterStats cares about ccTLD data.

Sites like WebHosting.info and DomainTools all but ignore ccTLD data and give a rather skewed perspective of non-US based providers.

With Hosterstats you can easily check the DNS history on any .com/.net/org/info/mobi/eu/asia/co.uk or .ie domain name.

While the site isn't the prettiest at present it is incredibly functional and nice and fast to load, so you get the information that you want quickly and easily.

It will be interesting to see what John plans on adding in terms of features in the coming weeks and months.

Eurid, the organisation that runs the EU registry, announced the introduction of 24 / 7 support for its registrar community starting next week.

With the large number of accredited registrars based in North America (and elsewhere) this change is sure to be welcomed.

Eurid is expanding its technical infrastructure this weekend.

According to notifications sent to Eurid registrars they are expanding into a new data centre space.

Unfortunately the knock-on effect is that the registry backend will not be available to registrars for up to six hours on Saturday.

Eurid, the registry for .eu, has updated some of their backend systems while also tweaking some of their frontend interfaces.

The web based WHOIS has been slightly changed to further protect privacy.

Eurid's EPP service has been offline or unstable for most of today.

The explanation provided was that the maximum number of concurrent connections had been reached... So why did it take them most of the day to increase the number in the configuration?

The mind boggles!

In some ways the failure of .eu to capture hearts and minds makes me sad. I'm European. I'd like to think that a European namespace could be a success, but that seems to be a misplaced desire.

As I mentioned some time ago, the only way to grow a namespace or TLD is through usage. Once people start to see a domain extension in "action" then they begin to start using it. If people start using it then everyone benefits - registry, registrars, "normal" registrants and domain investors alike.

When was the last time you saw a high profile .eu site?

You'd have to think long and hard about it, wouldn't you?

Even the "big boys" aren't really using their .eu domains actively.

Google.eu doesn't have any A records ie. it doesn't point anywhere.

Yahoo.eu points to a Yahoo site, but not to the European one!

Ebay.eu actually does what you'd expect it to do, but it was the only one I could find when I did a quick search this evening.

Why do I bring this up?

Last week John McCormack sent me some preliminary statistics on domain usage for the EU namespace and the figures were quite worrying. He's since published a blog piece with a breakdown of the stats and if I were in Eurid I'd be sobbing.

You can read John's article, but the basic underlying truth is hard to avoid.

Adoption of .eu has been pretty bad and that's being diplomatic about it.

While there may be a large number of domains registered only a very small fraction are in active use, with many simply redirecting to a ccTLD equivalent or being parked.

Launching a new TLD is not easy.

Afilias have resorted over the past couple of years to literally giving away domains for free and it looks like Eurid are adopting a similar approach.

DotMobi, however, have worked hard to build up interest in their TLD among users of all shapes and sizes and got the investors interested as well.

What will the future hold for .eu?

Will their PR pay off or will it all fizzle out?