Irish .eu Registrations - Do The Figures Add Up?

It is easy to be wary of EURid claims. Its roll out of the .eu gTLD has been problematic to say the least and it had denied that there was any problem with cyberwarehousing. When EURid claims that over 27202 .eu domains (01 August figure) are Irish registered then there is reason to question that figure.

A survey of the .eu gTLD by WhoisIreland.com, only 3379 of the identified .eu domains were hosted on the DNS of Irish hosters. Realistically this would put it between the Irish .net and .org ownership figures.

Perhaps there are some Irish companies that are being used as fronts for non-EU warehousing operations. Maybe IEinternet’s EUinternet.com registrar operation has been wildly successful and has put other Irish .eu registrars such as Eircom.net, Esat.net and Irishdomains.net in the shade. The total number of prior rights applications for Ireland is 3829. Extrapolating the number of .eu domains detected on Irish hosters would give a rough figure of 5000. Perhaps the true Irish owned .eu count will never known but a figure in excess of 27K does seem high.

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Written by John McCormac on August 10th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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7 comments

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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#1. August 10th, 2006, at 7:41 AM.

There are few enough of those showing up Michele,
Even the 1K accepted prior rights domains are beginning to filter into the mainstream. Given EURid’s rather dodgy parsing, I think that the only requirement for a registrant is an EU country in the registrant data. Whether the actual address exists is probably not checked. Even so, the 27K figure is far too high and more like a second year figure.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. August 10th, 2006, at 5:44 PM.

I suppose it could be argued that Irish owned .eu domains are very like the Irish owned com/net/org domains situation a few years ago Danny. Back then more Irish domains were hosted outside of Ireland than inside it. However given the way that EURid’s parsing seems to only require a valid EU country, the chances are that many “Irish” .eu domains are not Irish at all.

There is going to be an element of Irish .eu domains hosted outside of Ireland and it will probably take a correlation of all .com/net/org/biz/info/ie sites and IPs with .eu domains. I’ll probably do some work on it over the next few days.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#3. August 16th, 2006, at 7:20 AM.

Michele,
Given EURid’s lying about the problem with phantom hosters, and the quality of the parsing and validation of registration data, I doubt very much that its figure on Irish owned .eu registrations is valid. The only thing that it seems to validate is that the country given is on the EU list. So it is quite possible for a bogus registration to exist without it being noticed by EURid. That and a number of front companies (the Ultsearch one adding at least 1019 domains on its own) have artificially boosted the number of “Irish” .eu domains.