.eu In Freefall - Thousands Of Domains Dropping Each Hour

The .eu ccTLD is reaping the whirlwind as thousands of domains are dropped every hour now. The ccTLD, incompetently managed by EURid, was warehoused and squatted to such an extent that businesses and individuals throughout the European Union lost confidence in the extension. According to EURid’s only statistics, over 54% of .eu ccTLD is warehoused and potentially cybersquatted as of 31/December/2006. The .eu ccTLD peaked at approximately 2.6 Million domains registered. At the moment, it stands at 2455787 domains. The question now is about how low it can go.

The danger now is that most of the domains being dropped will be in the 1.2M or so of individual and business registrations. This is the core of the ccTLD, indeed the core of any domain. Without it, the TLD has no credibility. And given the way that EURid collaborated with the non-EU cybersquatters and warehousers, there is very little reason for people to hold on to their .eu domains other than for defensive registration purposes.
The European Commission who awarded the contract to run .eu ccTLD to the bungling EURid venture have only themselves and their “expert” advisors to blame for this mess. The only thing that would redeem the .eu ccTLD is the redelegation of the .eu ccTLD to a competent and well run registry and the obliteration of the warehousing and cybersquatting operations. But the fools in the European Commission are oblivious to the reality of the situation. Until real action is taken the market has decided, quite bluntly, that .eu domains are the junk bonds of the domain industry.

Tags: Irishblogs,Eurid, .eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 28th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and News Bytes.

No Porn For .ie ccTLD

The long running dispute over the domain “porn.ie” ended today when IEDR put the domain in the “Forbidden” category. This means that the domain cannot be registered. The move solves a lot of problems because there have been many attempts to register the domain. The renewal date is interesting though:

% Rights restricted by copyright; http://www.domainregistry.ie/copyright.html
% Do not remove this notice
domain: porn.ie
descr: Forbidden
renewal: 12-April-2107

The “Forbidden” category of domain names in .ie ccTLD is generally used to stop the registration of other top level domains and similarly problematic domains. This particular domain has had quite a few applicants and is considered a valuable domain by domainers, speculators and those involved in the adult entertainment industry.

Tags: Irishblogs , IEDR , Domains , .ie , Internet Statistics , Comreg , domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 12th, 2007 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.

European Commission Lies Highlighted By EURid Statistics

The latest press release from the European Commission claims that “.eu one year on: over 2.5 million have taken up a European address on the web” This is a lie. According to EURid’s own statistics from its Annual report for 2006, the number of registrants with one domain name: 610679. The rest of the stats make interesting reading because they show how utterly corrupted the .eu ccTLD is due to its mismanagement by EURid.

Registrants with more than 10000 domains: 6
Registrants with 5000-9999 domains: 18
Registrants with 1000-4999 domains: 64
Registrants with 100-999 domains: 1257
Registrants with 10-99 domains: 20886
Registrants with 6-9 domains: 22933
Registrants with 5 domains: 13200
Registrants with 4 domains: 23007
Registrants with 3 domains: 42887
Registrants with 2 domains: 115543
Registrants with 1 domain: 610679

The number of small scale registrants in .eu ccTLD is only 1128424. The rest is warehoused and squatted. Hardly a success unless you are some kind of click and drool moron employed by EURid or the European Commission. But then this quotation in the press release from the European Commissioner for with responsibility for the .eu fiasco, Viviane Reding, really shows how utterly clueless the EC is about the damage that has been inflicted on .eu ccTLD by EURid: “I congratulate EURid as the independent not-for-profit registry responsible for .eu, for successfully managing the extremely high demand from industry and the public and for helping us to deploy Europe’s identity online. I welcome in particular the recent efforts made by EURid to make .eu-registrations swifter, safer and cheaper.”

EURid screwed up the landrush by allowing phantom registrars to warehouse hundreds of thousands of .eu domains. It failed to take competent action against these warehousing operations despite being warned. The main beneficiaries of the .eu price cuts are the warehousing operations with their own phantom registrars. The .eu ccTLD does not belong to the people of Europe. It was betrayed by an incompetent registry and ignorant fools in the European Commission. The European Union is synonymous with corruption, waste and incompetence. The history of .eu landrush and sunrise confirms that. The people of the European Union have no confidence in EURid or the .eu ccTLD. Stripping EURid of the contract to run .eu would go some way towards restoring that confidence. Until that time, .eu ccTLD is a rotting, maggot infested corpse of an extension with little or no relevance to Europe.

Tags: Irishblogs,Eurid, .eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 12th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.

Top 20 .eu Hosters April 2007 - WhoisIreland.com

The figures above are .eu statistics based on over 2 million mapped .eu domains. The BIONIC figure refers to the number of Biz / Info / Org / Net / Ie / Com domains on a hoster.
Published monthly, WhoisIreland’s HosterStats Report provides an unparalleled insight into the strengths and weaknesses of hosting industry, identifying key players and trends.Aimed at firms that need to have accurate figures on the Irish hosting business, WhoisIreland.com uses industry-leading algorithms and proprietary methodology to provide the best data on the domains market.
Irish HosterStats Report

Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 6th, 2007 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.

.eu Drops Below 2.6 Million Domains

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the .eu landrush and the active .eu domain count on EURid’s status page has started to flutter again. It has now dropped below 2.6 million active .eu domains.
Yesterday evening, the figure was 2605363 active domains. Today at 1028 IST, the figure stands at 2599548. The .eu figures are beginning to fall as .eu domains are dropped. The question now is how many .eu domains will be dropped in the coming months?

There has been very little development in .eu ccTLD and despite all the guff from EURid about the use and awareness, .eu ccTLD still takes a back seat far behind EU ccTLDs such as .de and .uk. The main rule for EU countries seems to be that the first choice will be the ccTLD and the second choice will be the .com - if it is available. But then that is the problem with all new TLDs. They each have to face a massive pre-existing market and if they don’t have a unique selling point, then they just become another niche extension. The unique selling point of .eu was that it was a domain for the European Union. However the chronic mismanagement of the ccTLD by EURid has ensured that .eu is now more widely known for cybersquatting and cyberwarehousing than as a trustworthy domain for Europe.

Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 6th, 2007 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.

EURid Incompetence Irritates Registrars

From reading the reports of what went on at the Eurid presentation at the Lisbon ICANN meeting, it is clear that the registrars are less than pleased with EURid’s incompetence. Michele has a good write up here and Heise.de also covered it.

The reports above are staggering as they show how a registry should not be run. How these refugees from the Stone Age ever got the contract to run the .eu ccTLD is beyond me. After all, DEnic (the operator of the .de ccTLD - one of the biggest ccTLDs in the world) and Afilias were also in the running for the contract. Instead the European Commission and its panel of “expert” advisors gave the .eu ccTLD to a consortium that was mainly DNS.be with some input from the Swedish, Italian and Czech registries.
As for the software that EURid got from DNS.be - it seems that it was missing critical functions such as multi-year renewals and transfer operations. But one quote from the Heise.de article is really funny: “To create a system that is compatible with .com, .net, .org or .de is not the most important thing. Rather, our focus is on safety and security from the user’s perspective,” Peter Janssen, Technical Manager at Eurid, declared.” Perhaps if .eu ccTLD had been run by a competent registry that had not allowed .eu to be plundered on a large scale by cybersquatters and warehousers, users would have some confidence in .eu as a viable extension. The management of EURid and the European Commission betrayed the citizens of the EU. The .eu ccTLD is no longer the domain of the citizens of the European Union.
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 3rd, 2007 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.

Number of Active .eu Domains Falling

Over the past few days, the figures for .eu have been wobbling. Yesterday, the number of active .eu domains according to Eurid’s own stats site was 2600889. At 0728 this morning it was 2600822. Now, at 0853 IST, it is 2600796 domains. The number of .eu domains is apparently falling. A lot of junk domains will continue to be dropped over the next few months. I wonder how Eurid management will spin this market reality check?
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on April 1st, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.