.eu
Has anyone else noticed that the new TLD (technically a ccTLD but that’s another blog post right there) .eu hasn’t really come to anything?
Despite a lot of fuss made at the time of its public launch, I personally haven’t seen anyone using any .eu domains yet. (And yes, I do live & work in Europe.)
OK, so actually I know of 3 domains that actually resolve to a site – www.eurid.eu (that of the .eu registrar), www.europa.eu (the web site of the European Union who until that point had used the equally unfamiliar www.eu.int) and www.register.eu (which appears to be a fairly uninteresting domain registration service). The first two of those I found from a Google search and the third from a Google advert so they’re hardly in mass circulation.
What I find odd is that, at the time of writing, there is supposedly nearly 2 million .eu domains registered. But I can only find 3 that work?
I know there was some fuss made at the time that .eu became publicly available, that suggested that everything wasn’t totally above board. Now I’m really starting to believe it. And from the evidence of the one .eu domain that I tried and failed to register (that now resolves to an advertising filled landing page), and the things I’ve mentioned above, I have to ask the question: how many of those 2 million .eu domain names ended up in the hands of Europeans who actually wanted to use them?