Julianna
Circle ID published an article this week about the state of .eu, the European Union’s Top-Level Domain (TLD).
A full year has passed since the sunrise and landrush periods, and the first wave of renewals has come and gone. So what does the .eu look like a year later? In one word – underwhelming. A spidering the entire EU namespace and subsequent analysis of the response codes received (html, etc.) indicate only 22% of registered .eu domains appear to have been actively developed. So far there appears to be very little ‘natural’ or ‘genuine’ web development on the .EU extension so far.
So what is with the lack of activity? There are a lot contributing factors – domain speculation by phantom registrars and their EU based front companies, domain monetization and aggregation, protective registrations, etc. Many domain industry experts believe these factors have frozen out the small business and individuals that drive mindshare and ‘natural’ web development around a new domain extension.
Others suggest nationalism is also at play. (Why should domains be exempt from the quagmire of politics and identity?). On .eu’s faltering beginnings, Frank Schilling writes:
Europe has started two world wars because of nationalism. You are going to get a .de from the Germans or a .fr from the French when you pry them from their cold dead hands. My neighbor in Cayman is Italian…She still converts things into Lira even though the Euro has been around for nearly a decade. People are proud of their national heritage in Euroland and the domain extension tells folks the language they can expect to find at each destination. .EU offers little of that identity …. [T]he namespace is stagnating and it’s users will eventually return to com, net, org or the cctld of the country they are in.
I tend to agree. Research by CIRA has shown that 71% percent of Canadians prefer using the .ca extension over all others because it identifies them as Canadian on the World Wide Web. This appears to be as much a matter pride as presence. Why would the so-called drivers of natural web development – small businesses and individuals – choose an untested domain extension that doesn’t convey their real world story online? We chose Webnames.ca over Webnames.com for our business precisely because .ca conveys our story, even though we are much more than .ca registrar.
So what does the future hold for .eu, and the soon-to-be .asia? It may be too early to speculate, but resuscitating the extension won’t be easy. Would you choose a .na for North America over .ca? As always, we’d like to hear what you think?