The .EU domain covers the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) of the EU as well as its variants in Cyrillic and Greek scripts, as administered and managed by the non-profit organisation EURid. There were 3.7 million registered .EU domain names in April 2021, making the .EU domain the twelfth largest TLD and the eighth largest ccTLD in the world.
Growth
The report notes that .EU growth was flat across the entire period under scrutiny as negative growth of -2% in 2019, which resulted from a “continued saturation and consolidation of the domain name market”, as well as the impact of Brexit, was offset by positive growth of 2.2% subsequent to the rise in demand for domain names during the Covid 19 pandemic, when many people and business shifted their activities online.
Bucking the trend for stagnation were Germany, which had the largest share of .EU registrations at the end of the first quarter of 2021, along with Portugal, Ireland and Latvia, which had the highest growth over the period examined (124.2%, 78.7% and 33.3%, respectively).
Brexit
The period covered by the report of course also witnessed the removal of the right of United Kingdom (UK) residents and organisations established in the UK to hold a .EU domain name pursuant to Brexit, with the report stating that,
“the impact of UK’s withdrawal from the EU has been substantial on the .eu domain”.
From an initial figure of 240,000 .EU domain names registered to UK registrants in 2018, following several warnings from the Registry this dropped to 190,000 in 2019 and the remaining 81,000 domain names were suspended by the Registry on 1 January 2021.
Linguistic diversity
The report also highlights the fact that, in the period covered, the .EU Registry allowed EU citizens to register a .EU domain name irrespective of their place of residence and that it “expanded European linguistic diversity and multilingualism across the .eu domain” by launching the .ευ extension, the Greek script equivalent of .EU. The report boasts that the Registry offers “one of the largest IDN spaces in the world” with over 42,000 IDNs registered at the end of the first quarter of 2021, including 1,300 registered under .ею (the equivalent of .EU in Cyrillic script) and 2,700 under .ευ.
Security measures
Measures such as the Abuse Prevention Early Warning System (APEWS) (an automated system for predicting abusive behaviour that delays the delegation of suspicious registrations and triggers a verification procedure including a manual review leading to the delegation or the suspension of the domain name), the registrar lock service implemented in 2020 and the nearly 9,000 checks on COVID-19-related domain name registrations that resulted in the suspension of more than 6,500 domain names during the pandemic, were highlighted by the report as contributing to the security and trustworthiness of the .EU TLD.
Cooperation between the Registry and the Belgian Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Belgian Customs (Cybersquad), the Belgian Public Prosecutor’s Office and Europol as well as a joint Action Plan between the Registry and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) launched in 2021 to combat abusive and speculative domain name registrations are all cited in the report as shoring up the fight against illegal and abusive activities involving .EU domain names.
Conclusions
The report concludes that “the .eu domain continues to function in an effective and financially healthy manner, facilitating access to the Digital Single Market, allowing Europeans to display their European identity online, supporting the online presence of SMEs, and promoting multilingualism” and states that the .EU domain provides “an example to follow for other DNS operators”. But the report also warns against complacency stating that the Registry should “continue on its path to ensure a trusted .eu domain and to ensure that illegal behaviours and abuses that are evident elsewhere in the DNS ecosystem do not gain a foothold in the .eu domain space.”
Authored by Anchovy domain names team
