Monday, April 10, 2006
Just over 300,000 Europeans scrambled to register their .eu Internet domain names in the first hour of being able to do so, according to figures issued by the European Registry of Internet Domain Names (Eurid), the independent body set up to handle the registration process.
The four-month grace period, in which companies and owners of trademarks and brand names were given priority, means that from this week, it is “open season” for applications.
Eurid said just over 320,000 companies and organizations registered during the grace period, with companies from Germany representing 28.6 percent of applications, followed by businesses from Holland (16.6 percent), France (11 percent) and Britain a disappointing fourth with 9.2 percent.
However, these figures were dwarfed by the number of registrations now being received from individuals and smaller organizations. According to Eurid, just over 700,00 applications were received during the first morning, with, at the peak, 76 applications being received each second.
Registrars in the U.K. said that the proportion of applications from British businesses was surprisingly low, given that more than a quarter of the top 500 European companies were British.
Applicants were accepted on a “first come, first served” basis so long as they could demonstrate a relevant interest in the name.
Out of 330,000 registrations that were made, a total of 95,000 were disputed.
Some applicants lost out by minutes to favoured domain names in the initial rush. For instance car maker Volkswagen, which includes the Polo range amongst its cars, beat Ralph Lauren to the registration of www.polo.eu by just three minutes and 24 seconds.
The fastest application, coming just 1.7 seconds after the opening time of 11am on December 7, was by a Swedish company for www.sex.eu — a name that attracted twice as many applications as any other.
The next highest were hotel.eu (123 applications), travel.eu (97) and jobs.eu (93).
European domain names are expected eventually to number in the millions. Recent figures indicate there are 85.6 million sites registered in total on the web, with the most popular domains being .com (40 million sites), .de (9 million), .net (5.5 million), and .co.uk (4.5 million).
"We are satisfied to see that the interest in .eu has been so large and that many already regard .eu as a useful complement to internet's national top level domain names," said Eurid Managing Director Marc Van Wesemael, in a statement.
By: DocMemory
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