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Dot-eu free-for-all begins 7 April
06-04-2006
by Charlie Taylor

EU residents can apply for the new dot-eu domain from Friday following the end of the "sunrise" period which restricted applications to businesses and public bodies.

EURid, the not-for-profit organisation selected by the European Commission to manage the registration of domain names, opened its doors for applications on 7 December 2005. Initially, only trademark holders and public bodies were permitted to apply for the domain name. Since 7 February 2006, holders of other "prior rights", such as company names or business identifiers have also been able to submit applications.

However, the so-called "sunrise" period is to end on Friday and anyone with a residence in the EU will be permitted to apply to register a name under the dot-eu Top Level Domain.

Applications filed by citizens will be decided on a first-come, first-served basis. Unlike sunrise applications, "land rush" ones will be automatically registered without further formalities within the hours following their receipt.

"Tomorrow, Europe's competitive knowledge society will become very visible to the world on the internet," commented Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding.

"Europe and its citizens can now project their own web identity, protected by EU rules. I expect thousands of applications to be filed in the first few hours public land rush, making dot-eu a powerful domain name on equal footing with dot-com," she added.

All EU institutions and officials are to switch to dot-eu names, en masse, on Europe Day on 9 May 2006. Old and new official addresses will continue to work side-by-side for at least one year, after which only dot-eu names will be used.

Citizens wishing to register a dot-eu domain name are urged to pick an accredited dot-eu registrar from the EURid website. Registration costs vary across the EU but are expected to be from as low as EUR12.

"To date, there have been 340,000 applications made in Europe for around 240,000 different domain names. However, we think that there will be around 500,000 domain names registered tomorrow alone," said Phelim O'Connell, managing director of EU Internet, an accredited dot-eu registrar.

Although individuals will be able to apply for domains, O'Connell told ElectricNews.Net that he believes a large number of companies are also likely to submit applications from Friday onwards.

"The sunrise period was quite bureaucratic and therefore some firms may have been reluctant to apply for domains then. Moreover, there may well be some companies who were unsuccessful during the sunrise period who will be applying again."

"What we've seen happen so far is that a large number of companies that have applied for dot-eu domains already have a dot-ie or dot-com address. They applied for the dot-eu addresses in order to make sure that their brand wouldn't be diluted. We think that with the land rush there will be quite a lot of businesses who have registered their company name during the sunrise period but are now likely to register brand names etc during the free-for-all," added O'Connell.