Internet World

By Barry Fenning

 Eu domain names were launched in December 2005 as a country code top level domain for European union which was made available to the citizens and organizations of the EU member states. This Top Level Domain is taken care by EURid, an organization comprising of national registry operators from many European Union states. Full-fledged registration process started in April 2006.

The early phase of operation was termed as the sunrise period. This was further broken into 2 phases. The first phase began in December 2005, which was to check and allot domain names to registrants with existing rights based on geographic names and trademarks. The second phase was carried out from February 2006 which covered personal names, trade and company registrations.

In April 2006, registrations became possible for people without trademarks. Most people who were requesting domain names had already asked their registrars to have their requested domains pre-registered by putting them in a queue, not to miss a chance to register a domain. More than 700k domain names were registered even before first few hours of operation. Large registrars like Dotster and Go Daddy began to suffer from unresponsiveness and long queues of operation, allowing people to register through a person who has already bought a domain. Till August 2006, approximately 2 Million domain names had been registered. Now, .eu is the forth largest registered domain in Europe and holds the ninth position internationally. This process of grabbing domains by registrars was commonly known as the land rush process.

Many companies and individuals criticized this land rush process. They said that such a process created hundreds of phantom registrars, creating an unhealthy way of doing business. These “phantom” registrars had many opportunities and ways of registering a domain whereas genuine registrars had only one opportunity to register the same domain.

These domain names had also been brought to use by many European Union institutions by registering the second-level domain .europa.eu. Institutions and agencies made a switch from previous .eu.int to .europa.eu domain names in May 2006. However, the European Central Bank still uses the domain ECB.eu, unaffected by the shift.

.eu has its main users as websites with European or cross-border audiences and traffic, as known in the technical terms. .eu is more commonly used to emphasize that the website has a European Identity, as opposed to a website which has a strictly national country top-level domain or a global .com nature.

In most countries of European Union, national top-level domains have a major share in the market. The remaining share is spread over .com/.net/.org/.info/.biz in sequential order. Due to this, this young extension has had to work a lot to gain a significant share of these national markets.

Jack Dempsey is an avid follower of the domain industry. He has been writing on the articles at all levels for those wishing to better understand this rapidly expanding industry. Please visit http://www.LCN.com to register .eu domains

Domain Names

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By Brian Harrison

 If you are thinking of investing in domain names it’s important that you understand your market. Top Level Domains or TLDs are growing by the day, some would say that this is a great way for certain bodies to make even more cash and some would say that it opens up the domain name market to people who missed the boat on coms.

Which ever way you look at it the release of new TLDs is going to happen on a regular basis over the coming years and one such TLD that has just released is .me.

One of the newly released TLDs, that is causing a lot of interest is the .me. There are of course several reasons as to why this particular TLD is causing so much interest and we can go through them one by one.

Firstly for all English speaking nations the word “me” is commonly used and understood, this gives the TLD an advantage over certain other TLD domain releases in the sense that it can become part of your domain name or brand, for instance: call me, date me…etc. This makes it easier to remember and in some cased to brand. Secondly, due to the fact that the domain extension has a very broad appeal it naturally lends itself to individual or personal web pages and blogs.

You can see this in action already in the tv extension that is widely being used and accepted by media companies around the world as a good domain name extension for television companies and online tv channels. The explosion in social networking sites and the move to personal connection web sites lends itself perfectly to the .me tld and I’m sure you will see one or two big players in the area within the next couple of years.

Also if you take into account how ISPs and web hosting providers are simplifying the web development process and supplying packages that can have you up and running in no time at all, they are removing the barriers to entry in the market everyday. Another interesting point about the .me extension is that it is totally open and anyone can register a domain name.

Another success story in the domain names area is the European extension eu. It was first released a couple of years ago and has since steadily crawled up the charts of the most popular extensions. At the last count it had reached 3 million registered domain names and is growing at a steady pace.

The two other areas that should be mentioned and I would suggest to study them well is India and China. Although to market for cn has been very closely control by the Chinese government up to now we are finally seeing a little relaxing in the controls. This can be seen in the rapid growth of registrations.

This is also thrue of India and their in CC. They are finally waking up to the value of their national CC. There are 2 billion people in these two markets, alone they dwarf the entire domain and is only a matter of time before most of the people in these countries are online.

Taking all of the above into consideration if you are thinking of starting your own web site, blog or even your own business, don’t overlook the possibilities of the .me extension.

Bee Ltd is a domain acquisition and development company with many years experience in the domain name and internet market. You will find many useful articles and advice on all manner of subjects associated with domains names, SEO and web development at our site: Bee.eu

Domain Names

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