Over 250K .eu Domains Dropped In April

Over 250K .eu domains have dropped in April 2007. Many of them will not be reregistered. The reasons for this vary. Some of the domains were clear attempts at cybersquatting. Political parties and politicians had their names registered as .eu domains. High profile websites and brands were also targeted in the hope that the domains could then be sold quickly for a profit by the squatters.

One squatter operation, the XSS.RO/Kurt Janusch one had over 34K .eu domains deleted in April. Prior to the drop, it had over 43K .eu domains on its monetisation site. It now has approximately 11K. The Jay Westerdal/Ray King operation (using eight UK front companies) removed the nameserver data from at least 40K of their warehoused .eu domains in an effort to hide them. A significant percentage of .eu domains are hidden like this in order to evade detection because many of these warehoused domains would have trademark and intellectual property rights issues.

Many of the dropped domains, have as of this date, not been reregistered even after they have been released from quarantine. The quality of these dropped domains varied considerably from relatively good domains to complete dross. The problem for most speculators was that they applied mature market reasoning to a new launch, registering domains that might have a resale value in a mature market like that of .com TLD. However in a new market like .eu ccTLD, they were rubbish domains that would not even recover the registration fee.

The direct navigation operations like Ovidio and the Westerdal/King warehousing operation have renewed their .eu registrations. The danger is that many of the domains dropping now are from the business core of approximately 1.2M .eu domains. These domains form the heart of any ccTLD. They are the business domains that give an extension credibility - in the case of .eu, that credibility is completely lacking after the stupidity and incompetence of EURid’s management in handling the Landrush and warehousing issues.

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Written by John McCormac on June 3rd, 2007 with comments disabled.
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#1. June 4th, 2007, at 11:52 AM.

.EU Deletions Uncovered: At the beginning of last month I was wondering how many EU domains would drop off the ‘net completely ...

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. June 4th, 2007, at 2:11 PM.

I was thinking about doing it as part of the book about the .eu fiasco Michele,
I was going through the list and it seems like a hell of a lot of sub regfee domains were registered. Most of them have dropped. To accurately sort the dropped domains from the hidden domains (Westerdal/King/Pool/Tempus Enterprises etc), it would be necessary to check the domains against the DAS.