April 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of April 2006.
EUrid, the Commission and their advisors made a mess of the .eu landrush. The level of incompetence, from the technical failures to the utterly idiotic registrar validation process was astronomical. EUrid, the Commission and their advisors effectively betrayed the citizens of the European Union and sold out .EU.
Bob Parsons of Godaddy has an excellent summary of the situation and some proposals but they may not go far enough.
The Commission had their own little FAQ on the .eu gTLD. It has this gem of an example of handwashing that Pontius Pilate would be proud of:
“How does the Commission react to claims that “bogus” registrars have been registering .eu domain names?
The Commission cannot instruct the Registry EURid to ban any of its accredited Registrars on the basis of suspicions as to their probable behaviour or motivations. In a case where there is evidence that a registrar has acted in a way that is contrary to the .eu Regulations, appropriate measures will be taken.”
What kind of evidence would these people need? And given their utter technological and domain industry incompetence, would they even understand it? It is clear that giving the .eu gTLD to this shower to administer was like the opening scene from the movie 2001. The Commission and EUrid were the apes who were not bright enough to adapt and so got clobbered.
Look at the date of the press release. These people knew about bogus registrars before the landrush. And they did nothing about it.
Drastic action has to be taken to restore public confidence in the .eu gTLD. Some of these steps that would restore some confidence are:
1. The registrations and registrar status of every fraudulent registrar are immediately revoked;
2. If any domain for which a legitimate EU owned website exists is pointed to a PPC page, then that domain is immediately revoked;
3. EUrid pays for the dispute resolution process where the complaint is filed by a citizen of a European Union country.
Would these simple measures be applied? Probably not. The Commission and EUrid have exhibited nothing but incompetence and far from .eu being .com’s little brother, it is like some bad clone of .info or biz. Far from penalising such incompetence, the Commission rewards it. Like so many EU things, people may just have to accept that .eu gTLD is another case of EU fraud, corruption and incompetence.
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU,EU, Domains, Internet Statistics , Eurid,domainnames
Written by John McCormac on April 11th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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The landrush phase of .eu was badly handled by EUrid. The webservers, whois lookup and registrations system could not handle the rush. Approximately one million domains were registered but perhaps 40% or more could have gone to squatters and PPC parasites. And EUrid and the EU commission facilitated the great betrayal of the citizens of the European Union.
You really have to wonder about the kind of incompetence that allowed Friday’s .eu fiasco to take place. Based on the launch of previous generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), it was obvious that there was going to be a rush and a big one at that. But apparently EUrid was completely unprepared. One wonders by what means this shower were even given the .eu franchise. Did they put up the best song and dance presentation for the Commission’s selection process? Did the Commission actually act on advice from industry experts or did they just purchase head time with some consultancy that claimed to know about the domain business?
Hundreds of supposed .eu “registrars” were set up and approved by EUrid in the weeks coming up to the landrush phase. And yet many of these “registrars” shared the same contact details and were based outside the EU. Clearly, many were set up with the one single objective: squatting .eu domains.
Each legitimate registrar had only one connection with with to register a .eu domain but some of these fake “registrar” operations had more - perhaps hundreds more. These “registrars” were front operations. Many shared the same mail and phone contact details. Yet to the wonderfully astute people in EUrid, they were all different registars.
Did EUrid check these “registrars” out to see if they were real domain registrars rather than squatter and PPC parasite operations? No.
Did EUrid actually have a credible registrar evaluation process? No.
Did EUrid actually have a clue about this weakness in its system? That’s the question that really needs answering. If the people in EUrid did understand what they were facilitating, then EUrid, and the morons who created the .eu registrar approval process and the Commission were complicit in this process of allowing these paper companies to plunder the .eu gTLD at the expense of the EU citizens. Perhaps EUrid were, in that famous phrase, only following orders.
So is .eu recoverable or will it turn into another cesspool of a gTLD? Yes. It could be. The regulations are there but it remains to be seen if EUrid or the Commission will have the guts to use them. As the smoke of Friday’s landrush clears, one thing is certain: EUrid Screwed .EU!
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU,EU, Domains, Internet Statistics , Eurid,domainnames
Written by John McCormac on April 10th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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As the landrush phase of .eu registrations began today, the whois and lookup services for .eu developed problems. The web based whois lookup frequently times out. It looks like either the backend of the Eurid registry is either not up to the task of coping with the large number of registrations that hit the system today.
But this large number of registrations is only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps more than 40% of today’s registrations were bad faith or fraudulent or speculative registrations. In the last few weeks a large number of domain squatter operations based in the US became .eu registrars. These operations point their squatted domains to Pay Per Click landing pages to make money. They are the cancer of every domain and they seem to have targeted the .eu gTLD.
Will Eurid do anything about the PPC parasites? One has to wonder. The fact that these PPC parasites were even allowed to become registrars in the first place points to a serious lack of a clue among those in the “not for profit” organisation entrusted with handling the .eu gTLD.
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU,
EU, Domains, Internet Statistics , Eurid
Written by John McCormac on April 7th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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