IEDR Should Be Marketing .ie over .eu
The .eu gTLD is a squatter’s paradise. The incompetence of Eurid in managing the Sunrise and Landrush phases has effectively limited the credibility of .eu as a viable domain. The high number of .eu domains for sale on SEDO is a good example of how the domain is perceived - almost 10% of .eu domains are for sale there. That’s somewhat at odds with the image that Eurid tries to present of .eu being a well run gTLD. The reality is that Eurid is perhaps barely capable of running a small ccTLD. And this incompetence should really be exploited by the operators of Europe’s managed country code domains like Ireland’s .ie ccTLD.
Unfortunately, years of dealing with a clueless technology press in Ireland has left IEDR unable to market .ie effectively. Most of what pass for “technology journalists” in Ireland are just extensions of the PR companies. Despite being churned out on some college production line, they really just stick their names on press releases and call it technology journalism. And the .eu fiasco presented so many good stories from the corruption of the Sunrise phases to the sheer incompetence of the Landrush phase.
But not all the faults lie with these “technology journalists”. They just didn’t get the press release. They didn’t get it because IEDR never even bothered to send one out. The reality is that IEDR just doesn’t know how to market .ie effectively.
The incompetence of EURid presented IEDR with an excellent opportunity to push the credibility of .ie over .eu but the opportunity was missed. While the CEO of IEDR, David Curtin had a rather unfortunate Op-Ed piece in the Irish Independent, the core of the Irish online news sources (ENN and Siliconrepublic) was ignored. That is where IEDR should have been proclaiming the integrity of .ie rather than in a newspaper.
If IEDR had a clue, it should be pressing home the fact that .ie has greater credibility than .eu for Irish users and it should be using the Irish online news sources to hammer home that message. It also should really deal with the .ie squatter problem before it too becomes a miniature .eu. Nike.ie is squatted as is Adidas.ie and a pile of others. IEDR has the chance to stop .ie ccTLD’s credibility being destroyed but will it take it?
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, .ie, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics , Eurid, domainnames
, IEDR
Written by John McCormac on May 15th, 2006 with 5 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.