Brussels, 11/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - The “.eu” domain has now been available to the public for a year and more than 2.5 million domain names have been registered. In a press release published on 11 April, the European Commission underlined that “this enormous number of active users makes .eu Europe's third most popular top level domain (TLD) and seventh most popular worldwide”. With a 17% increase of registrations over the past five months, .eu is also one of the fastest growing TLD names on the web.
Citizens and companies from all 27 EU member states applied for a .eu domain name during its first year of existence, but the strongest demand for .eu came from Germany (31%), the UK (17%) and the Netherlands (12%). The great success of .eu has also been accompanied by an increase in demand for national domain names in most member states. For instance, since October last year the growth in the number of national domain names in Germany and the UK (.de and .uk) has been around 5%. The Netherlands (.nl) experienced the highest growth rate - 10% over the same period.
The popularity of .eu with the public also encouraged France to open its national domain name .fr - previously reserved only for professionals, associations or public bodies - to the public, using rules and practices similar to those used for .eu's introduction.
The European Commission welcomed the fact that the opening of the “.eu” domain was done “smoothly” and that the excellent management of the system had allowed for a high number of litigation cases to be avoided. On Wednesday, the Commissioner for the information society, Viviane Reding, declared, “I congratulate EURid as the independent not-for-profit registry responsible for .eu, for successfully managing the extremely high demand from industry and the public, and for helping us to deploy Europe's identity online. I welcome in particular the recent efforts made by EURid to make .eu-registrations swifter, safer and cheaper." (ol)