EURid to release 9.000 .eu domain names following court decision
The .eu-registry has announced that they will be releasing almost 9.000 .eu domain names which where originally registered in bath faith during the .eu launch in 2006. A large amount of .eu domain names where originally registered in 2006 by domain name warehousers and cybersquatters. While the registry had rules in place that for example forbid direct .eu-registrars to warehouse domain names themselves, it was soon clear that these rules where easy to break. For example by setting up two entities, one that got accredited as .eu-registry and an other one that would be the warehousing client.
The domain names that now will be released, were however owned by a Chinese cybersquatter who was not entitled to own or register any .eu domain name to begin with, because he didn’t take residence in the EU. He was however using (false) UK address information to by-pass the simple address verification that is done during a .eu registration request.
EURid took this to court, which on 21 September 2010 eventually decided in favour of the registry and ruled that the domain name registrations were registered in bath faith. The domain names will only now be released (about one year later), because the loosing party still had time to appeal to the ruling.
However, don’t expect a gold rush on these 9.000 domain names. The full list is published by the registry and turns out to consist for the larger part out of worthless domain names like xh72.eu or i0100.eu or clear trade mark infringements like irispen.eu or arcelorprojects.eu. Some interest might be shown in first and last names like anthia.eu, bosmans.eu or dijksma.eu.
With the .eu landrush being one of the very first brand new TLD launches on such a large scale, there was clearly still a lot to learn and all TLD’s that followed since copied what was well organised with .eu and improved on what went wrong. Since then for example, a landrush will no longer be “first come – first served”, but will work via an auction system.