Should IEDR Be Worried About .eu?

Should IEDR be worried about the impact of .eu on the Irish market? This does imply that the board of IEDR has a clue about the domain business. It does not. Not one of the members of the board has operational experience in the domain business. So it is left to the management of IEDR to be concerned. But does it really understand what is going on in the .eu ccTLD?

There is a huge discrepancy between the number of .eu domains detected on Irish hosters (around 5700) and the number of Irish registered .eu domains (28K+) claimed by EUrid. The reality lies somewhere in between. While the distribution of .eu domains for Ireland shares similarities with the hosting situation of a few years ago. Back then, the hosting business here was dominated by ISPs and most small hosters hosted outside of Ireland on hosters in the UK and US. Given that there were only a few accredited .eu registrars in Ireland (EUInternet.com, Irishdomains.net, Eircom.net, Esat.net) there wasn’t much to choose from. So there is a good chance that Irish registrants used .eu registrars outside of Ireland.

But even with that taken into consideration, the numbers for Irish owned .eu domains is unusually high. Some of that can be attributed to front companies for cyberwarehousing operations like Marchex/Ultsearch registering .eu domains through an Irish front company. More can be attributed to the incompetence of EURid when it comes to dealing with bogus registrant data. There are probably tens of thousands of .eu domains with bogus registrant addresses. And of course there was the landrush madness that would have led to people trying to get domains - many of which will lapse next year when it turns out that there is no resale market for them.

IEDR has introduced an API which should speed up things for resellers. (Thanks to poorly drafted legislation, there is no such thing as an IEDR registrar.) But the more management that IEDR gives up to the resellers, the more difficult it becomes to justify the costs of IEDR.

IEDR has allowed cyberwarehousing operations within .ie ccTLD. Its management was completely lacking when it allowed EUBROWSER.COM to register domains like bebo.ie, irishindependent.ie, googel.ie, dmoz.ie, windows-onecare.ie, onecare.ie and a few hundred others, many of them generic terms.
But the figures for .eu do not pose a threat to .ie ccTLD yet. Indeed the figures for .eu relative to any European ccTLD do not pose any immediate threat. What IEDR has failed to do is to take advantage of the incompetence of EURid. As soon as it became apparent that Irish companies where not getting their .eu due to PwC BE’s “interpretation” of the Sunrise rules, IEDR should have used some of their tame press release recyclers in the Irish tech media to hammer home the point that Irish companies stand a far better chance of getting their domain .ie ccTLD. And the slogan? “Screw .eu - It’s .ie for me!”

Tags: Irishblogs,IEDR, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on October 12th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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