The European Commission is celebrating three years of the .EU top level domain being made available to all and that there are now more than three million domain names cementing its position in the top ten TLDs..EU racked up over 700,000 registrations within 24 hours of being available to all and sundry to register and by the end of the first week there were 1.5 million registrations. The two millionth registration was achieved in July 2006 and in January 2009 the three millionth registration milestone was passed. Today there are 3,041,051 .EU domains registered.Before the general availability period, a sunrise period for trademark holders commenced in December 2005 followed by a landrush period.In its announcement on the third anniversary of .EU’s general availability, the European Union has given some interesting statistics on the per capita registration in each of the 27 countries from which people are eligible to register .EU domains.Cyprus has the most .EU domain names per capita with 66.1 .EU domains per 1,000 inhabitants followed by Luxembourg (54.9), the Netherlands (24.7), Ireland (13.1) and Germany (11.1). Countries with the lowest number of per capita registrations are Romania (0.9), Portugal (1.1), Bulgaria (1.2) and Spain (1.5).What is interesting to note among those countries with the highest rates of .EU registrations is there is a correlation between their ccTLDs having either high registration costs (Luxembourg and Ireland) or the name space is crowded with high numbers of registrations (Netherlands, Germany). In the case of Cyprus it appears one can only register a .CY domain name through the registry, hence making their availability more limited.A detailed listing of European countries and the total numbers of registrations and registrations per 1,000 inhabitants is available from:
europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/536.EU domain names can be registered from either:
NameAction – www.nameaction.com
Europe Registry – www.europeregistry.com
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