.eu

Type:	Non-Profit
Industry:	Internet
Founded:	1999
Headquarters:	Woluwelaan 150, 1831 Diegens
Country:	Belgium
Website:	www.eurid.eu
Key People
Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager

.eu is the country code top level domain name (ccTLD) of the European Union. It is managed and operated by EURid, a non-profit organization founded by three registry operators namely DNS Belgium, Istituto di Informatica e Telematica and Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur, IIS, under the authority of the European Commission.

Background

In 1999, the eu was approved as the two letter-alpha code for the European Union by the ISO-3166 Maintenance Agency. Subsequently in 2000, the European Council endorsed the creation of .eu TLD during its meeting in Lisbon to improve the electronic commerce within the European Union. On April 22, 2002, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union enacted Regulation (EC) No 733/2002 which calls for the implementation of the .eu ccTLD to represent and promote the image of European community in the global information networks.

On May 21 2003, EURid was delegated by the European Commission as the registry operator of the .eu ccTLD in consultation with its member States. On April 28, 2004, the European Union adopted the Policy Rules on how to implement the .eu ccTLD under which it serves as a complementary domain name to the existing ccTLDs in Europe and other generic top level domain names (gTLD) for the purpose of increasing competition and providing alternative choice to internet users in the region and to improve the interoperability of networks within the European region.

The ICANN Board represented by its President and CEO Paul Twomey entered a Registry with EURid through its Managing Director Marc Van Wesemael to complete the delegation process of the .eu ccTLD in 2005.

Sunrise Period

EURid implemented a four months Sunrise Period for the .eu ccTLD on a first come, first serve basis. It started on December 7, 2005 until April 2006. During the Sunrise Period, the registry received more than 245,000 registrations.

Landrush Period

On April 7, 2006, EURid open the .eu ccTLD for public registration known as the Landrush Period.According to EUrid there was a strong demand for .eu domain names and describe the .eu ccTLD as a useful to the internet's top level domain names. By June of 2006 the .eu registrations reached around 3 million.

Bob Parsons], Founder and CEO of Go Daddy openly criticized the Landrush registration process implemented by EUrid and described it as a scam. According to him, some notorious companies found loophole to the process and hijacked the system. Parsons explained that some companies modus operandi was instead of registering their real active registrars, they created hundreds of new phantom registrars with similar addresses and contact information designed to hijack the .eu landrush giving the notorious companies greater opportunities to register domain names. EURid Spokesman Patrick Linden denied Parsons allegations and explained that EURid validated the registrars that were accredited to sell .eu domain names.

One month after EURid's denied Parson's allegations of abuse on the .eu ccTLD Landrush process, the organization discovered that three companies from UK namely Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd used syndicated registrars as front to acquire and stockpile thousands of domain names. This activity known as warehousing is not allowed by the EURid and sued the registrars for breach of contract and froze the more than 74,000 domain names that are allegedly stockpiled by syndicated registrars.

IDN Implementation

On December 2009, EURid implemented the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) to allow members of the European Union whose languages use non ASCII characters in their alphabets for instance the Swedish Swedish å, the German ü, the Romanian ș and other characters from the Bulgarian and Greek alphabets which uses accents, cedillas and ogoneks.