This may bore anyone who’s here strictly for the latest and greatest in Design, but as I spent three years working for an Internet company I’ve done a lot of work for domain names over the years, especially with “Landrush” periods for new Top Level Domains (or “TLD’s” if you want to sound cool at parties).

A Landrush is basically what it sounds like, a new TLD - like .ca or .eu - is made available on a specific date and anyone and everyone tries to register the best names or names they have ownership on first. .eu was intended to be “Europe’s Domain” and was launched around this time last year in a massive, three-phase rollout that my company was marketing up to a year prior to the launch date.

So the Landrush happened, and thousands of companies registered their trademarked names at ridiculous prices (companies like my former company would happily use their connections to the .EU registry to register your name before anyone else…for a price). Within 20 minutes of the first Landrush, 45,000 .eu domains were registered. A year later 2.5 million .eu domains have been registered - most likely every 3- and 4-letter name you can think of. But what’s being done with these domains? As of right now…NOTHING!

sex.eu was the “Holy Grail” of .eu domain names, with over 100,000 applications on the first day! However, as of the writing of this post, the .EU Registry still hasn’t been decided who actually owns the rights to it, so the domain is currently not even in use!

Let’s check a few big companies and see their .eu websites…. 

cocacola.eu? Nope!
dell.eu? Reroutes to a .com…
apple.eu? Reroutes to apple.com…
bmw.eu? (A German company with a seperate .de website)….Reroutes to the .com!

With 2.5 million names, .eu is now the 7th most popular TLD in the world, but most Europeans have never even HEARD of .eu! If .eu is going to be successful, it’s time for companies that registered .eu domains to start using them for something! .eu is a great TLD for anyone with a European presence. A seperate .eu website can be more geographically specific to the European audience than your “global” .com address.

There are problems with the registration of .eu names. Personally I think the Landrush process was overly complicated and the long approval process has kept a lot of companies from making .eu publically known (there are thousands of domains that are still waiting for approval by the .EU Registry, and they were registered over a year ago!). But if a few large companies started taking advantage of the new TLD we might see something other than 2.5 million URL’s that don’t go anywhere!