more fun with the .eu domain
got a nice piece for the front page of the irish times this morning about how the .eu domains for a number of high-profile irish politicians and political parties have been grabbed by speculators. or perhaps there is a perfectly valid reason why a swedish company might want sinnfein.eu. if you want to while away a few minutes it's interesting to see who's registered what and which domains are in dispute (a certain public service broadbacster seems to be having problems securing its' .eu domain). the eurid whois database is here and you can read my story here.
a reader susequently pointed out to me that www.progressivedemocrats.eu has also been snapped up. but it seems this particular speculator has a left-leaning sense of humour. follow the link and see where they have re-directed it to.
Nice to see the newspapers finally picking up on the story. It probably warranted a feature in the Friday tech section.
The squatting problem in .eu is far greater than many people realise. It is difficult to gauge but a figure between 40 and 80% of domains registered during the landrush period could be squatted/bad faith registrations. Many of those would have been registered by bogus registrars that are, in reality paper companies set up by US and Canadian operations to get the most valuable .eu domains. The incompetence of the Commission and EUrid has been quite staggering and it seems that they are not going to do anything about this plundering of .eu gTLD. This would ensure that .eu becomes another backwater like .info or .biz gTLDs. The end result could be a boost in credibility for .com and the ccTLDs.
Posted by: John McCormac | April 21, 2006 at 07:42 AM