40,000 .EE domain names have been registered following a six-month transition to new registration policies Eesti internet, the Estonian registry announced on 4 January.

The six-month transition period expired on 5 January, where anyone with a domain name registered prior to 5 July 2010 could register their domain name under the new policies.

“One of the goals of the domain reform is to overhaul the register as it contains an enormous amount of ghost domains: accumulated over a period of 18 years but no longer used. Tomorrow evening, when the six-month re-registration period expires, we will know exactly how many .EE domains are really still being used and what is the percentage of the ghost domains in the old register,” said Marek-Andres Kauts, Chairman of the Management Board of the Estonian Internet Foundation.

“A total of 40,000 domains are already included in the overhauled register as of today, including 30,000 old domains that have been re-registered. About 500 domains were being re-registered every day, with this number reaching 900 in the recent weeks,” Kauts noted.

“There are speculations as to how many people have switched over to eu. domains but our calculations indicate that this number is insignificant, less than 900 names,” Kauts added.

The domains that are no longer used include many valuable domains, with considerable interest expressed in their registration and usage anew. On the 5th of January, 2011, the deletion proceeding will begin for the domains that have not been re-registered and they will eventually become available.

As a result of the deletion proceeding, the email addresses and web pages associated with the domain will stop working. At the end of the deletion process the domain will be erased from the register and anyone wishing to register it will be able to do so.

“The deletion proceeding is customer-friendly and during the first 30 days of expiry the domains will be marked as being deleted in the public domain register, but they will remain usable. In February the domains will become inactive and their websites and e-mail addresses will cease to function. In early April the domains that have not been re-registered will become available to the general public for new registration on a first-come, first-served basis,” Kauts explained.

To register your .EE domain name, check out Europe Registry here.