Hosting 365

For the past few months businesses could claim ownership of .EU domains if they had company registration or trademark documentation to support this claim - and 300,000 European Union wide did so.
On April 7th this pre-registration phase ends though, and anyone can register a .EU domain name.

Predictions are flying back and forth on how many domains will be registered, and how much of an impact .EU will have. To be sure in the first few months, many businesses will register a .EU to protect their trademark, and the hype will doubtless generate a few more sales, but in the medium-long term, what impact will the .EU TLD (top level domain) have?
First of all, where country domains such as .IE, .CO.UK, .NL and so on, do moderately well, that is primarily because they are VERY focussed on a specific nation. Whereas .EU is aimed at the entire European community - which is difficult to target on a single domain - because of the many languages involved.

I’m not sure where .EU fits in to be honest. As I said, a ccTLD (e.g. .co.uk) promotes the web site within a country - but where does .EU promote? .COM is arguably a better top-level or primary domain extension, as it’s generic and globally applicable. The .EU domain is really only useful for a company doing business ONLY in the EU and actually THROUGHOUT the EU (as oppose to within the business’s own country - in which case .be/.nl/.ie would suit better). And it’s more likely that a business would be international (EMEA / APAC) than just EU, as it’s actually easier do business with nations whose primary language is the same as the country of origin.
hosting365’s predictions on .EU registration numbers : the impact will be similar to that of .info and .biz : lots of hype, but the majority of registrations will be companies registering all TLD’s as a trademark protection exercise, and still using .com or the ccTLD as their primary domain.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Hosting365. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.