EUrid Screws .EU
The landrush phase of .eu was badly handled by EUrid. The webservers, whois lookup and registrations system could not handle the rush. Approximately one million domains were registered but perhaps 40% or more could have gone to squatters and PPC parasites. And EUrid and the EU commission facilitated the great betrayal of the citizens of the European Union.
You really have to wonder about the kind of incompetence that allowed Friday’s .eu fiasco to take place. Based on the launch of previous generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), it was obvious that there was going to be a rush and a big one at that. But apparently EUrid was completely unprepared. One wonders by what means this shower were even given the .eu franchise. Did they put up the best song and dance presentation for the Commission’s selection process? Did the Commission actually act on advice from industry experts or did they just purchase head time with some consultancy that claimed to know about the domain business?
Hundreds of supposed .eu “registrars” were set up and approved by EUrid in the weeks coming up to the landrush phase. And yet many of these “registrars” shared the same contact details and were based outside the EU. Clearly, many were set up with the one single objective: squatting .eu domains.
Each legitimate registrar had only one connection with with to register a .eu domain but some of these fake “registrar” operations had more - perhaps hundreds more. These “registrars” were front operations. Many shared the same mail and phone contact details. Yet to the wonderfully astute people in EUrid, they were all different registars.
Did EUrid check these “registrars” out to see if they were real domain registrars rather than squatter and PPC parasite operations? No.
Did EUrid actually have a credible registrar evaluation process? No.
Did EUrid actually have a clue about this weakness in its system? That’s the question that really needs answering. If the people in EUrid did understand what they were facilitating, then EUrid, and the morons who created the .eu registrar approval process and the Commission were complicit in this process of allowing these paper companies to plunder the .eu gTLD at the expense of the EU citizens. Perhaps EUrid were, in that famous phrase, only following orders.
So is .eu recoverable or will it turn into another cesspool of a gTLD? Yes. It could be. The regulations are there but it remains to be seen if EUrid or the Commission will have the guts to use them. As the smoke of Friday’s landrush clears, one thing is certain: EUrid Screwed .EU!
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU,EU, Domains, Internet Statistics , Eurid,domainnames
Written by John McCormac on April 10th, 2006 with
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John
#1. April 10th, 2006, at 8:58 AM.
Based on the number of fake “registrars” on the EUrid list, the number could be much higher. Then you have the abuse of low cost trademarks by made for registration companies in various EU countries. Many of these companies are paper or shell companies set up with the sole purpose of abusing the registration system during the Sunrise phases. The whole process seems to be utterly corrupt while observing the letter of the law.