Germans and Dutch biggest fans of new .eu domain

Ingezonden door LVB op 2006-03-12 01:22

Since 7 December 2005, local authorities and holders of registered trademarks in the European Union can apply for a .eu domein name.  And since 7 February, company names can be applied for.  This sunrise period, reserved for protected names, ends on 6 April. EURid is the operator of the new .eu domain, while PriceWaterhouseCoopers validates the claims during the sunrise period.  From 7 April on, the landrush period begins, where everyone with an address in the EU can request a domain on a first come, first served basis.

According to the status page on the EURid website, more than 300,000 applications have been received for more than 220,000 domain names.  Some 35,000 applications have already been approved, and more than 30,000 domains are already up and running on the net, for email or for the web.

Surprisingly, more than half of all the applications come from Germany and the Benelux (Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxemburg), while these countries contain less than one quarter of the EU population.

Here is a pie chart showing the proportion of .EU applications per country.  While EURid considers Gibraltar, Réunion, Guadeloupe and Åland as separate territories, I have added their figures to their respective mother countries: the UK, France and Finland.




In the table below, I took the data from the EURid status page, and completed them with population data from the EU countries. I calculated the number of domain requests and approvals per million people, and the approvals/requests ratio per county.  Globally, 11% of all applications are approved at this time. But for the Spanish requests this is 22% while only 5% of all Italian requests are approved.  We can not draw conclusions from this discrepancy, since it can be caused by a difference in quality of the applications, or by a difference in processing speed by the PWC staff (all native speakers, it seems) doing the validation. 


Reacties

#19548

Dave

donderdag, 27 april, 2006 - 11:48

 

Yes, official trademark registration for Benelux + transfer of the trademark from the registration company to our clients company. Some are most probably going to appeal the decision by using the ADR procedure.

Another company tried to register in phase 2 of sunrise period (their company's name) and was also refused. They submitted their statutes (dutch: statuten).

There is also 1 client who is recognised as a public body in Belgium and who has submitted a document of the belgian ministry of culture proving they are a public body.
However, they did try to register generic words (for example: ropeskipping.eu), but also the name of one of their european divisions.

#19433

LVB

dinsdag, 25 april, 2006 - 14:55

 

Dave, can you specify what kind of "legal documents proving their right to the name" you are talking about? Were they official trademark registrations?

#19431

Dave

dinsdag, 25 april, 2006 - 14:42

 

As the reseller of a .eu registrar we feel very cheated by eurid and PriceWaterHouseCoopers.

All .eu-domains our clients tried to register in the sunrise period were denied. They all sent in the legal documents proving their right to the name.
However eurid does not give any reason for refusing the names.
And for the ones eurid did give a reason for, the reason was that generic words can't be registered during the sunrise period.
However, I found a site claiming generic words were being registered in the sunrise period by companies who can never supply the right documents to register such a name and when I look up the domain name in your WHOIS interface, they are right (http://www.eudomaindesaster...).

While our customers still have to pay a staggering fee just for submiting their dossier, they get nothing in return.
Our image is damaged by this and some clients never want to register any domain name with us again because of eurid's and PriceWaterHouseCoopers incompetence to provide decent and clear information on wat documents to submit and which domain names could be registered in the sunrise period.

Did we have to wait several years on this TLD just so eurid and PriceWaterHouseCoopers can set up a worldwide scam?