September 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of September 2006.
The monthly figures for .eu ccTLD show a classic boom to bust pattern. The growth figures ,(April is from 8/04/2006), below. The July figures show where EURid put the Ovidio Limited syndicate’s domains on hold. A domain that is on-hold is still in the zonefile and active.
April: 453928
May: 147311
June: 155432
July: -2352
August: 78283
But there is a hidden element to these figures. The accepted Sunrise domains are being activated and added to the number of active .eu domains. With the claims of PwC BE “validating” over 1000 .eu applications a day, the number of new registrations is less than it appears. Far from the .eu TLD being one of the market leaders, its growth rate is falling back to that of a mid-range ccTLD.
The next major event for .eu will be when the Ovidio Limited syndicate’s .eu domains are released for reregistration. But knowing how incompetent the management of EURid is when it comes to such issues, these domains will probably be snapped up by other bogus registrars and end up in the possession of exactly the same people.
Written by John McCormac on September 29th, 2006 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
It seems that Technorati is banjaxed. It thinks that this blog has not updated in 33 days. And it seems that this is not unique - other blogs have been having the same update problem with Technorati.
Written by John McCormac on September 25th, 2006 with 8 comments.
Read more articles on General.
It seems that Eircom has finally put two and two together. It is now advertising its domains and hosting services to its mailing lists. The prices are a bit unrealistic though. At least Eircom is treading water in the hosting business. Esat has been sinking rapidly over the last few years. Eircom lost its dominant position in the Irish hosting business a few years ago. Perhaps it got complacent. Maybe the management just didn’t have a clue how rapidly the market was changing. By the time they copped on, the market had left them well behind and Hosting365.ie emerged as the largest Irish hoster. Given the extent to which the market has changed, the only way back to the top for Eircom would be to buy one of the larger second generation Irish hosters. Even then the quality of the management would be critical.
http://www.whoisireland.com/reports.html
Tags: IrishBlogs , Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting
Written by John McCormac on September 25th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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Last week, the numbers of active .eu domains seem to stutter. EURid apparently decreased the number of active domains by approximately 4000. On some message boards, it appears that EURid has been sending out e-mails requesting verification of the registrant’s address. It seems that the address data provided on some registrations is not valid.
Some of these domains could have exploited a weakness in the EURid registrant validation process that only requires a valid EU country in the ‘country’ field. The registrars are, apparently, supposed to take care of the address verification. With such a gaping hole in the registry system, the chances are that the number of .eu domains with dodgy registrant data is a significant percentage of the active .eu domains. But then dealing with the problem might reduce the number of registered .eu domains to a more realistic level and it would look bad for EURid to lose so many domains.
Tags: Irishblogs,Searchengines .EU, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on September 25th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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Is it worth spending time building a .eu search engine? The launch of .eu has been a disaster because an incompetent registry couldn’t deal with the whole TLD being subverted by some clever business people. But even so there must be a few thousand new sites in .eu that are not PPC mortgage, creditcard or ringtone linkswamps.
Most .eu websites, so far, are either “coming soon” pages, PPC network pages or parking pages. There is very little evidence of major sites using their .eu domain as a primary identity. Most are just pointing their .eu domain at their main .com or .ccTLD website. Ironically this narrows down the problem to finding that rarest of things - a genuine .eu website.
They exist but they are mainly blogs. The newness of the .eu ccTLD has provided some opportunity for bloggers to build new .eu based blogs using domains that were not available in .com gTLD. But blogs do not make a TLD and it may well be years before there are any major, unique, sites in .eu ccTLD. This does mean that if the dross can be removed, a small and fast search engine covering .eu is feasible.
Tags: Irishblogs,Searchengines .EU, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on September 24th, 2006 with 16 comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines.
The .eu Sunrise II phase was meant to give business owners a chance to protect their firms’ names. However this has not been the case for Irish businesses. If you look at the number of Irish firms that have had their registrations accepted it is far less than those who have had their registrations rejected:
Accepted COMP-ID: 131
Rejected COMP-ID: 479
That’s over 78% of Irish firms that have had their Sunrise II registrations rejected by PwC BE. They now have to make the descision as to whether it is worth taking an ADR action against PwC BE’s decision or taking the risk of trying to get their .eu domain when it is released as part of the Landrush phase.
But the odds of getting their domains when they are released are poor. Most of these mini-landrushes are dominated by bogus registrars and the domains end up on some domain auction site or as a PPC advertising page.
Tags: Irishblogs,.EU, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on September 22nd, 2006 with 2 comments.
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The hidden cost of the .eu fiasco to European businesses could be over 10 Million Euros. EURid’s validation operation, PwC BE has rejected over 61400 Sunrise applications. Each of these applications cost both time and money to European businesses to file and prepare. And getting affidavits and documentation together is not cheap. Those costs are unrecoverable and it seems that the application fees are not either.If the application fails the EURid/PwC BE “validation” process, there is no refund of fees. More than one .eu registar has mentioned this point.
Does this mean that EURid and PwC BE pockets the fees for the rejected applications? That’s tens of thousands of rejected application fees. That’s potentially millions of Euros. And these people get to keep the money?
And as for the lie that the Sunrise Phase was intended to prevent cybersquatting - EURid and PwC BE faciliated cybersquatting by awarding domains to warehousing operations with dubious subsequently discredited Benelux trademarks.
Tags: Irishblogs,.EU, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on September 21st, 2006 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.