Earlier today, the .eu-registry EURid opened up the possibility to register IDN domain names under .eu. Such IDN-names are domain names using other characters than only latin characters. The opening up for these extra domain names was done via a large landrush, during which each .eu-registrar was able to send in their domain name requests as soon as possible. The only rule being “first come, first served”.
Different rules where set into place, making sure every registar had equal possibility to got hold of good domain names. This however didn’t go fully as planned. One of those rules as announced in the planning, was that a registrar would get a hitpoint when incorrectly trying to register a domain name that was not available, but would be able to collect up to 750 of those hitpoints (compared to normally 100) before being blocked. Simply because, during a landrush, there isn’t much time to check availability and there is a good chance of a domain name being available one second and no longer being available a second later, when you try to register it.
On the crucial moment, this however turned out not to be the case, causing registrars to get blocked unexpectedly, reasonably soon. This will most certainly cause some uproar with registrars that where disadvantaged because of this, compared to others who carried out request in a slightly different way and therefore collected less hit points.
However this landrush was a major success. During this landrush, approximately 40,000 .eu IDN domain names were registered.