| Author (Person) | McLauchlin, Anna |
|---|---|
| Series Title | European Voice |
| Series Details | Vol.11, No.43, 1.12.05 |
| Publication Date | 01/12/2005 |
| Content Type | News |
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By Anna McLauchlin Date: 01/12/05 From next Wednesday (7 December), businesses will be able to begin registering for a .eu website address. A survey carried out in October by UK domain name company Hostway found that around 65% of businesses felt that .eu would be important to their business operations in Europe. 60% of those questioned said that they thought customers would eventually search .eu rather than .com when looking for EU-based companies. Those applying for a .eu domain name fall into four main categories. First are the big businesses that may never use the name but want to protect their intellectual property rights and insure themselves against costly legal cases that could arise if someone tries to register www.bayer.eu or www.nokia.eu. The next two groups are small businesses and private individuals, which can also register a company or personal domain name, most likely because they are based in the European region and wish to create a more geographically relevant website. Then finally there are speculators, those who hope to make a quick buck from registering a website name that someone will eventually want to pay a lot of money to buy. To ensure that those who have the legal right to a name are protected, the company that will operate the .eu domain - Brussels-based EURid - will launch a two-phase sunrise period starting on 7 December. On this date, all companies with registered rights - such as trademarks - will have two months to register their domain name. In the second phase, companies with other rights such as unregistered trademarks, trade names or company names, can begin registering on 7 February 2006. Registration will be open to everyone from 7 April 2006. Anyone wanting to register for a .eu domain name has to do so through one of 520 accredited registrar companies. It costs €45 plus the registrar's fee, which can range from tens to thousands of euro. According to Nick Wood, managing director of Com Laude, a UK-based registrar, the .eu domain name is generating a lot of business interest in the ten new member states. Large companies with cross-border EU activities are also applying, Wood said, but are less supportive of the new domain name as it is often just an extra expense to protect their intellectual property rights. "The new .eu domain is very interesting for businesses for two reasons," Wood says. "Firstly, the de facto address has previously been .com, but this is now overcrowded. Around 45% of the 78 million website addresses are .com, which means that most names have now been taken, plus it's a domain name with strong US connotations. "Secondly, if you are a business wanting to communicate with clients across the EU, applying to all member states to be able to use their national names is expensive and time-consuming because they have to be maintained annually." The new domain could also potentially set a precedent for other blocs to establish their own name outside the traditional arena. Previously, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) regulated international names such as .com or .org, setting registration fees and stipulating the nature of companies that could apply for them. National names such as .be or .de were controlled nationally, with ICANN only having technical responsibility for setting them up. The European Commission had to put pressure on ICANN to allow .eu to be outside ICANN's control, in the same way that national domain names are. Article anticipates the launch of a sunrise period on 7 December 2005 during which businesses were to be able to begin registering for a .eu website address. |
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| Source Link | http://www.european-voice.com/ |
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| Subject Categories | Business and Industry |
| Countries / Regions | Europe |
