EURid Slashes Prices As .eu Sales Collapse

EURid is to cut the registration costs of .eu domains to 5 Euros from January 1st 2007 in the wake of collapsing .eu sales. The price reduction is presented as being a response to the success of the .eu ccTLD. However the reality is that EURid has made a complete mess of .eu ccTLD and the credibility of .eu has been destroyed by cyberwarehousing, cybersquatting and the staggering incompetence of EURid.

EURid claimed that this substantial reduction was possible due to the huge interest in .eu and the high number of registrations. The reality is that cyberwarehousers and cybersquatters account for a very large proportion of .eu ccTLD and they were aided by the sheer incompetence of EURid in handling bogus registrars and the massive amount of cybersquatting and cyberwarehousing that this caused.

The incompetents in EURid management seem to think that cutting prices will enhance renewal rates. The reality is that .eu domains are on sale on domainer websites for around 5 Euros each and they are not being bought. All viable TLDs have some element of domain trading but the way that .eu domains are not being traded shows how utterly devalued the .eu ccTLD has become.
The funniest quote in the EURid press release is this:

“EURid is now following up on its promise to reduce the fees after one year of operation. We hope this will stimulate more users to see the advantage of having a true European Internet presence by choosing a .eu domain name,” says Marc Van Wesemael, managing Director of EURid.

I don’t know if this guy realises that European people no longer trust or own .eu - it is mainly in the hands of US and Canadian cyberwarehousers and cybersquatters and it is the incompetence of his organisation that sold out the .eu ccTLD. Europe has one response to EURid - Screw .eu!

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Written by John McCormac on November 17th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard
#1. November 17th, 2006, at 8:30 AM.

Sad.

But what to do? Who is ultimately responsible for .eu?

Not that it would make much difference, but should we be writing to MEPs?

Would there be any value in putting up a complaint website where people could sign a petition for submission to the EC (or whoever the responsible body is)?

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. November 17th, 2006, at 5:37 PM.

It has already been done with little effect. EURid just continue to botch things up. I wonder if the upcoming action against the Ovidio syndicate will be any different. Though the timing of the release is very convenient.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Ian Jones - Web-Store Ltd
#3. January 31st, 2007, at 1:00 AM.

We were the sole applicant for our .eu for our domain during sunrise yet we still got rejected and the domain ended up with a domain name reseller under what we believe are questionable circumstances. See our full story at http://www.webstore.co.uk/document.aspx?id=eudomainfiasco.htm

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#4. February 1st, 2007, at 12:56 PM.

EURid is run by people who are utterly incompetent and should never have been given the contract to run .eu ccTLD. They chose PwC BE to “approve” applicants’ rights to domains and one ADR cited the highly automated nature of PwC BE’s operation as being against the nature and spirit of rights validation. Given that around 81% of UK companies and businesses that applied for their business name as a .eu in Sunrise 2, there is something utterly incompetent about how PwC BE and EUrid handled the whole .eu ccTLD.

EURId is apparently being audited by an exernal company at the moment and the results of this audit will probably be published later this month. However given the way that things work in the EU, they will probably be given a clean bill of health, despite screwing up the launch of .eu ccTLD on a massive scale and allowing non-EU and EU cybersquatters and warehousers to buy up over 60% of the ccTLD without taking any action.

As for the joke of a legal department, they were notified of domains registered with clearly bogus information (US addresses with an EU country name in the country field) and these domains remain active. Such bogus registrations are commonplace because the onus is on the registrar to make sure that the registration was valid. Many didn’t.

As it stands, the .eu ccTLd is a disaster. The business community has no confidence in it. EURid made millions from the rejected applications. I would hate to think what will happen if anyone from Eurid ever turns up at an industry conference in Europe.

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