As Anchovy News readers will know, only eligible entities can generally register .EU domain names, that is to say companies, organisations and individuals that are based in the European Economic Area (EEA). The EEA includes the 27 countries of the European Union (EU) as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
In October 2019, EURid also enabled EU expats to register .EU domain names. Almost two years later, on 2 August 2021, EURid extended the eligibility criteria to internationally-based citizens of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway as well. .EU domain names are now available to all entities that are established in the EEA and to all individuals who are either citizens or residents of the EEA.
This rule of course also applies to domain name registrations under the .EU variants in other scripts that are run by EURid, that is to say .ею (.EU in Cyrillic) and .ευ (.EU in Greek).
In a recent publication, EURid also announced that Brexit-related withdrawn domain names could still be recovered until 31 December 2021. As frequently reported in Anchovy News, the Registry put into place a transition period in order to enable UK registrants to demonstrate their compliance with the eligibility criteria and thus keep their .EU domain names. They could do so by indicating a legally established entity in one of the eligible Member States, or updating their residence to a Member State, or proving their citizenship of a Member State.
All registrants who did not demonstrate their compliance by the given deadline saw their domain names move to a “suspended” status on 1 January 2021, meaning that the domain names could no longer support any service, but could still be reinstated if the registration data was updated to meet the eligibility criteria by 30 June 2021. On 1 July 2021, the domain names that were still non-compliant moved to a “withdrawn” status (meaning that they could not function and were no longer in the .EU zone file) and will remain in that state until their deletion by EURid.
However EURid is now giving holders of such domain names a last chance to keep their domain names by extending the deadline. Thus all UK registrants who can prove their compliance and have not done so yet must now contact EURid directly by 31 December 2021 before the domain names enter a deletion state on 1 January 2022.
Authored by the Anchovy News team
