There were 174,903 new .eu domain name registrations in the first quarter of 2021 taking the overall total registrations in the European ccTLD to 3,724,513, according to EURid’s Q1 2022 Progress Report [pdf] released last week. Three countries led the way with Luxembourg showing an increase in registrations of 7.4% for the quarter, Portugal (4.5%) and Liechtenstein (2.8%).
Following Brexit businesses and individuals in the United Kingdom became ineligible to register .eu domain names. Just four years ago there were well over 300,000 .eu domain names, out of a total of 3.8 million, registered to British registrants. Most of these became ineligible and there remain 3,604 .eu domains registered to British registrants.
In the first quarter, EURid released 48,000 of the .eu domains that registrants were no longer able to show they were eligible to hold. It wasn’t just Brexit that put a dent in .eu registrations. There were also some comprehensive culling following the launch of EURid’s award winning abuse prevention mechanism, Abuse Prevention and Early Warning System (APEWS), to detect possible malicious registrations that led to some thousands of domain names being deleted.
The top country for .eu, .ею and .ευ registrations remained Germany with 1,019,925 at the end of the quarter followed by the Netherlands (468,057), France (310,040), Italy (277,394) and Poland (227,326). Countries that showed the largest growth year-on-year were Portugal (104.9%), Saint Martin (50.0%) and Latvia (13.8%). The largest declines were for Gibraltar (down 97.8%) and the United Kingdom (94.0%), both due to Brexit, and Martinique (15.2%).
The first quarter also saw EURid acknowledged by the European Commission as an exemplary DNS operator while 96% (out of 81 respondents) of the registrar community expressed their satisfaction with EURid’s services. In addition, EURid announced Peter Janssen as the new General Manager, published the 2021 Annual Report by the Dynamic Coalitions on Data and Trust and participated in the 2022 Cloudfest in Rust, Germany.
In other EURid news, the registry advised Monday they are extending the Covid-related domain name checks. Initially, these measures began in April 2020 in order to protect end-users from possible misuse of domain names. As of 2 May 2022, due to the war in Ukraine, EURid started checking newly registered domain names that have a root of the word “Ukraine” in all EU official languages. EURid advised they have amended their APEWS system to prevent the registration of suspicious domain names.
Registrants of domain names containing certain keywords are required to validate their data and submit a statement of registration in ‘good faith’.
To download EURid’s Q1 2022 Progress Report, go to: https://eurid.eu/media/filer_public/9c/44/9c4411cc-c5de-4b7f-9771-6eafc58bbfec/quarterly_report_q12022.pdf