IEDR Should Be Marketing .ie over .eu
The .eu gTLD is a squatter’s paradise. The incompetence of Eurid in managing the Sunrise and Landrush phases has effectively limited the credibility of .eu as a viable domain. The high number of .eu domains for sale on SEDO is a good example of how the domain is perceived - almost 10% of .eu domains are for sale there. That’s somewhat at odds with the image that Eurid tries to present of .eu being a well run gTLD. The reality is that Eurid is perhaps barely capable of running a small ccTLD. And this incompetence should really be exploited by the operators of Europe’s managed country code domains like Ireland’s .ie ccTLD.
Unfortunately, years of dealing with a clueless technology press in Ireland has left IEDR unable to market .ie effectively. Most of what pass for “technology journalists” in Ireland are just extensions of the PR companies. Despite being churned out on some college production line, they really just stick their names on press releases and call it technology journalism. And the .eu fiasco presented so many good stories from the corruption of the Sunrise phases to the sheer incompetence of the Landrush phase.
But not all the faults lie with these “technology journalists”. They just didn’t get the press release. They didn’t get it because IEDR never even bothered to send one out. The reality is that IEDR just doesn’t know how to market .ie effectively.
The incompetence of EURid presented IEDR with an excellent opportunity to push the credibility of .ie over .eu but the opportunity was missed. While the CEO of IEDR, David Curtin had a rather unfortunate Op-Ed piece in the Irish Independent, the core of the Irish online news sources (ENN and Siliconrepublic) was ignored. That is where IEDR should have been proclaiming the integrity of .ie rather than in a newspaper.
If IEDR had a clue, it should be pressing home the fact that .ie has greater credibility than .eu for Irish users and it should be using the Irish online news sources to hammer home that message. It also should really deal with the .ie squatter problem before it too becomes a miniature .eu. Nike.ie is squatted as is Adidas.ie and a pile of others. IEDR has the chance to stop .ie ccTLD’s credibility being destroyed but will it take it?
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, .ie, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics , Eurid, domainnames
, IEDR
Written by John McCormac on May 15th, 2006 with
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But seriously, IEDR should do something about the blatent cybersquatting problem in .ie cctld. It would be too easy for EURid to criticise IEDR for the same thing. But Curtin really should have used the article to push the credibility of .ie more.
#1. June 8th, 2006, at 11:24 PM.
I think IEDR is in a very tricky position Roger,
The daily number of .ie registrations is running close to the number of Irish .eu registrations (it varies though). The geographic nature of .eu also makes it attractive to the new webdevelopers and programmers entering the market because .ie is harder for to get. Students who previously could only get a gTLD now have the option of a .eu domain - not quite the geographic specificality of .ie but at least it is associated with Europe.
The steep rise of the .eu has I think scared the IEDR because it showed that there was, partially, a demand that was not being met by either .ie or the com/net/org/biz/info gTLDs. It has added another 24K domains to the com/net/org/biz/info side of the equation. It was easy for IEDR to get the gullible technology journalists to concentrate on the success of .ie purely being a .ie : .com count (leaving out the net/org/biz/info counts). That’s how it pitches it to make .ie look to be doing better than it is. The fact that Eurid published the number of .eu domains owned by each country and the awareness of .eu means that it is difficult now for IEDR to just refer to the .ie:.com figure.
The mapping spiders running on a dataset of active (detected) .eu domains here are showing 79% of the .eu domains resolving to websites. The analysis will probably show that many of these are parked or redirected.
IEDR had a good opportunity but it wasted it. The .eu is heavily squatted and there are hundreds of thousands of possible bad faith registrations. But without the facts, Curtin’s angle was just that of an interested bystander. IEDR should really have been been hammering home the managed aspect of .ie cctld even though it has a small squatter problem that IEDR has not yet addressed.
I don’t know if the .ie ccTLD is well enough managed to allow it to grow dramatically. Perhaps the only way to grow it rapidly is to deregulate it and that would require a well engineered backend for the registry. But that would turn in it into a cesspit like .eu gTLD and it would lose what may be .ie’s most valuable asset.