EURid Defers EEA .eu Eligibility, Retains Discounted ADR and Results of How .eu Domains Are Used Study

A few announcements from EURid, the top-level domain registry for .eu. First up, EURid has had to defer allowing EEA citizens to register .eu domain names.

This follows the announcement last month where the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) had reached an agreement that would extend the citizenship rule to EEA nationals.

The deferral has been made necessary as the decision to enter the regulation into a formal application is waiting for the lifting of a constitutional requirement to enable this. Therefore eligibility will be postponed until further notice.

Assuming this rule becomes effective, this new regulation will allow EEA citizens from Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland to register .eu and its variant scripts domain names regardless of their place of residence. More information will be made available as it comes to hand.

The discounted fee for the basic .eu ADR procedure fee will remain in place at least until the end of 2020. In the agreement announced last week with the institutions appointed to rule on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) proceedings for the .eu top-level domain (the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center and the Czech Arbitration Court), EURid decided to extend the discount on the basic .eu ADR procedure fee until the end of 2020. This means that the ADR fee per dispute complaint is as low as €100.

To dispute a .eu, .ею or .ευ domain name registration, and if one believes they have a prior right (within the EU or EEA) to that domain name (e.g. holding a trademark, trade name, company name, family name, etc.), and that the current holder has registered, or is using the domain name for speculative or abusive purposes, one may challenge its registration by initiating an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedure.

And in the third announcement last week, EURid announced the results of the first part of the .eu website categorisation [see infographic below]. 200,000 .eu domain names were crawled through and 81.67% were found to be connected to a web server. In addition, 88% of the active domain names had the potential for activation of mailboxes.

Subsequently, of the total domain names crawled, 35,890 have been manually classified by the Milan based Italian cooperative “Opera in Fiore” according to the categorisation defined by several members of CENTR and based on NACE. The categorised websites were in different languages, mainly the 24 EU official languages.

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