.eu Junk Dump In Progress - Thousands Dropping Per Hour

Turn around of .eu

The fall of deletion of .eu domains stops already in the last week. I was suprised that only 10 % of the .eu were deleted.

You can see already a turn around in the statistics. One reason ist, that there are a lot of good domains in quarantäne and they will be registered again. Another reason is the starting of using .eu for projects. One important reason is also that the registrations price was strongly reduced.

The average sale price for .eu was 2006, 1850 USD and better than .de, .org, .net and .info (http://www.sedo.de/presse/Domain-Marktstudie2006.pdf). Over 1125 .eu were 2006 sold via sedo and this is a indicator, that .eu is and will be a dynamic market.

The registrations will go over 2.5 Mio. already in the next 3-6 months !

Regards

Enzyklop

Enzyklop said:

The fall of deletion of .eu domains stops already in the last week. I was suprised that only 10 % of the .eu were deleted.

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Most of the domains that were dropped are junk. Some are outright squats of existing high profile .com or .cctld websites. And the mistake is to take it as being an overall drop. The reality is that some country's .eu counts were hit a lot harder than others. The UK lost over 100K - that's approximately 20% of its footprint. Now Cyprus barely lost a few hundred. The reason for this is that around 90% of Cyprus .eu domains are owned by aggregators/warehouser operations.

You can see already a turn around in the statistics. One reason ist, that there are a lot of good domains in quarantäne and they will be registered again.

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Then I guess you don't actually know what really is in quarantine. The business domains that were squatted by operations like XSS.RO may well be reregistered but most of the dropped domains really are junk.

Another reason is the starting of using .eu for projects. One important reason is also that the registrations price was strongly reduced.

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Very little is happening in the .eu webspace. The .eu webspace is a desert. There is very, very little natural development. Sure you've got a few blogs and individual websites but there is no .eu pureplay yet. There hasn't been in over a year. The ccTLD has been so badly discredited by the mismanagement of it by the fools in EURid, that it is not a trustworthy extension. Businesses that have their .eu just point them to their real website.

The average sale price for .eu was 2006, 1850 USD and better than .de, .org, .net and .info (http://www.sedo.de/presse/Domain-Marktstudie2006.pdf). Over 1125 .eu were 2006 sold via sedo and this is a indicator, that .eu is and will be a dynamic market.

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Sedo's figures actually show a near dead market. And that's a landrush market when the number of small sales should have been through the roof. From EURid's own stats, there were only a few thousand registrant changes each month to December 2006. That is utterly pathetic in a landrush market.

The registrations will go over 2.5 Mio. already in the next 3-6 months !

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The Junk Dump phase isn't over yet. There's still another few months of it to run. There will be more drops this month and the number of deletions is really hitting some countries badly. Germany is actually keeping .eu afloat at the moment.

EURId being the incompetent shower of sh%#heads that they are, don't publish accurate and trustworthy statistics. Therefore there is no separate figure for deletions/drops. This means that the true exent of the Junk Dump cannot be accurately gauged so it is probably a lot worse than it appears.

The Junk Dump phase lasts for about five months after the anniversary of the landrush in any TLD. Thus the Junk Dump phase for .eu is from April 2007 to about August 2007. The 40 day quarantine period tends to skew the figures somewhat so a domain deleting in August 2007 would really have been registered in July 2006 or so. Then there is the mickey mouse DNS.be based registry software that cannot calculate a "domain year". It physically renews all domains at the end of the month of the domain's registration anniversary.

These are rough, uncorrected figures for the April Junk Dump phase:

Austria AT -4.13%
Belgium BE -5.01%
Cyprus CY -0.13% (a) Mainly Warehousers/Aggregators
Czech Rep CZ -5.95%
Germany DE -4.09%
Denmark DK -3.05%
Estonia EE -14.02% (b) Also used for fake US registrations.
Spain ES -11.12%
Finland FI -5.03%
France FR -5.33%
UK UK -21.61% (c) Major warehousing problem
Greece GR -9.00%
Hungary HU -17.68%
Ireland IE -14.85% (d) Contains Front Companies for major US domain holders
Italy IT -20.52% (e) Also has a few aggregator/warehouser ops.
Lithuania LI -2.48%
Latvia LV -8.77%
Holland NL -1.71% (f) Home to large warehouser ops like Blixem.
Poland PL -8.61%
Portugal PT -11.82%
Sweden SE -5.96%
Slovenia SI -10.36%
Slovakia SK -7.15%

(Romania RO and Bulgaria BG not shown as they only joined the EU in January. Also the overseas territories are not included.)

(a) Ovidio Syndicate accounts for most of Cypriot registrations. Also at least two other aggregator operations operate out of Cyprus.

(b) Estonia was used in the country field in over 100 identified cases of registrant fraud based on one particular US registrar. Many of these domains have not yet been dealt with by EURid due to incompetence.

(c) The warehouser's haven of choice. Used by the Kurt Janusch (XSS.RO) operation and by a number of other speculators including Jay Westerdal (domaintools.com/Nameintelligence) and Ray King (ex-Snapnames.com) with eight identified front companies. Also Michael Berkens (mostwanteddomains.com / Worldwide Media Inc) has his Malls Limited front company in the UK. Tempus Enterprises and CoursersUK are also UK companies. The real UK .eu figure is probably around 150K - the rest is warehoused/aggregated or squatted etc. The XSS.RO operation dropped over 34K of its domains accounting for a lot of the UK's drop in April.

(d) Marchex registered an Irish front company to use for its registrations and would account for at least 4000 of Ireland's remaining 26,775 domains. Momentous.ca also has used an Irish front company to register some of its domains (Drake Ventures Limited). Given the high level of incompetence in EURid, it would not be unthinkable for people with Irish names domiciled outside of Ireland to register their domains - after all, EURid wouldn't know Waterford, MI from Waterford IE and it was meant to be the registrars checking the country field right? Could these fools in EURid tell Boston MA from Boston UK?

(e) Italy has also dropped a lot of its domains. But again a number of potential warehouser/aggregator operations were detected there. Some of these have dropped domains recently.

(f) Holland has a relatively large domain footprint for its size with over 2.3M .nl domains registered. However it is also home to warehouser/squatter operations like Blixem.nl that gamed the simpleton .eu legal framework to register thousands of .eu domains based on dodgy Benelux fast track trademarks.

Regards...jmcc

I'll agree that there was some "shifty" behavior at the beginning of the .EU, but is it any different from the beginning of .mobi or any other newer extension where the money pours in the speculative front, only to be crapped out the realistic back-end?
I remember the huge drops of .us and .info, and the soon-to-come .mobi - I love the hard statistics used in the thread thus far, but are they any worse than any other landrush-reflux?
-Allan :gl:

IAmAllanShore said:

I'll agree that there was some "shifty" behavior at the beginning of the .EU, but is it any different from the beginning of .mobi or any other newer extension where the money pours in the speculative front, only to be crapped out the realistic back-end?

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The .eu ccTLD was a master class in incompetence. A mickey mouse ccTLD registry (DNS.be) backed venture gets a contract to run what is in effect a gTLD, underestimates the demand and the risks, and its management, legal and technical backends couldn't cope. The decision to award the contract was made by a bunch of politicians in Brussels who know nothing about the domains business. The result, naturally, was an unmitigated disaster.

All landrushes are followed to some extent by a Junk Dump phase where the most irrational domains tend to get dropped. These also include a lot of squats of existing domains in the gTLDs or ccTLDs where the speculator failed to flip the domain for a quick profit.

Ordinarily a lot of the speculative element would be removed in the Junk Dump but what appears to be happening with .eu ccTLD is that the extension is moving towards being a primarily warehoused/squatted extension. There are only 1.3M or so genuine registrations (individuals and businesses owning less than six domains).

This low end user figure is an indication of serious trouble. These are the registrations that will make or break the extension as they provide the natural growth and development for the extension. And most of them are pointing to the existing .com/gTLD/ccTLD versions of the websites. The .eu ccTLD is only in use by a handful of people.

EURid is incapable of mapping its own zone. It did not distinguish between parked and active, content rich websites (the majority of .eu is parked/PPCed). And that recent "survey" of .eu website usage only dealt with 1000 domains from what I remember. The majority of .eu domains are parked either on PPC sites or on the hoster/ISP "coming soon" IPs. If that core figure of end users drops below 1M then .eu can be written off for years to come. It will be battling with .biz gTLD.

EURid was advised of the phantom registrars issue prior to landrush but took no action even though it was allowed to protect the integrity of .eu ccTLD under the EU regulations. The legal framework for .eu was so stupidly drafted that included no 'prior use' aspect to balance the 'prior rights' aspect. Had that simple thing been included, a lot of the sunrise/landrush mess would not have happened. (Actually there was a concerted effort to use hundreds of UK front companies to claim generics and well known marques in Sunrise 2.)

Some of the drops in April were from identified warehouser/squatter operations like XSS.RO. But the interesting thing is that many of the warehousers/aggregators like Ovidio syndicate, the Westerdal/King operation, the Malls operation are holding on to their domains. Indeed the Westerdal/King operation knocked thousands of its warehoused/squatted domains out of the zone by removing their nameservers (at least 40K of them) in an attempt to hide them.

I remember the huge drops of .us and .info, and the soon-to-come .mobi - I love the hard statistics used in the thread thus far, but are they any worse than any other landrush-reflux?

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I should have the zones from the .info and .biz post landrush Junk Dump phase that I could check. (Actually I've zones for com/net/org/biz/info/ie going back to 2000 that I use for my domain stats work.) I will dig them out and run a few checks over the next few days.

The TLDs like .com and .net take years to move into their mature phase. The problem with .eu was that speculators and warehousers/aggregators simplistically took the most likely domain names from the TLDs and registered them in .eu in the hope that they would be valuable. Some of them, specifically US company and corporation names are clearly worthless because these businesses don't operate in the EU. The generic keyword domains are perhaps on more solid ground but they are long term plays. In an early market, generics are useless compared to a strong brand. Generics only seem to work well in a mature market where people expect that there is a website on that domain. But what good is a generic in .biz if you don't have the generic in .com? The 'Direct Navigation' model also has a number of problems for minor TLDs and ccTLDs - the most important of these being traffic.

Regards...jmcc

Thanks, jmcc - good points and well reasoned. :tu:
Would love comps on other ccTLD drops, but don't bust your back doing it, it was only to satisfy my curiosity
-Allan :gl:

IAmAllanShore said:

Thanks, jmcc - good points and well reasoned. :tu:
Would love comps on other ccTLD drops, but don't bust your back doing it, it was only to satisfy my curiosity

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Comparing the Junk Dumps in .biz/.info with .eu is an interesting idea Allan. Doing a stats check on two .info or .biz zones only takes about 20 minutes including pre-processing and I should have some of the old stats on backups - it is just a question of remembering which computer I left them on.

Regards...jmcc

If you think this is big - just wait 'til renewal time comes up for .MOBI domains

my junk was dumped starting at the beginning of this year. Perhaps dumped 85% of them.

jmcc said:

Most of the domains that were dropped are junk.

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A lot are junk (>70 %) but I also found some good names, which I registered and will registert.

jmcc said:

Then I guess you don't actually know what really is in quarantine.

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Every domain which is is or was in quarantine, is deleted form the statistic - around 200.000 !

jmcc said:

The .eu webspace is a desert.

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The .eu is no tropical garden until now, o.k., but also no desert. There are already some websites - for example:

www.greenpeace.eu
www.milka.eu
www.Versace.eu
www.Politikportal.eu
www.starter-portal.eu
www.biokorn.eu

The use of the .eu shows the growing DNS queries. There were 22962 DNS queries per minute in Dec 2006, in April only 3303 !

http://www.eurid.eu/images/Documents/Quarterly_reports/eurid\'s quarterly_4_web.pdf (page 8).

jmcc said:

The Junk Dump phase isn't over yet. There's still another few months of it to run. There will be more drops this month and the number of deletions is really hitting some countries badly. Germany is actually keeping .eu afloat at the moment.

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The Big Junk Dump is over , I think - the registrations went from around 2 375 000 to 2 388 332 last week. I ecspected much more drops.. around 25 % (= 500.000), but now it`s only 10 %.

jmcc said:

EURId being the incompetent shower of sh%#heads that they are, don't publish accurate and trustworthy statistics. Therefore there is no separate figure for deletions/drops. This means that the true exent of the Junk Dump cannot be accurately gauged so it is probably a lot worse than it appears.

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Hmm...I don't think that the .eu statistic is a fake or not trustworthy - because the .eu is under the patronage of the EU Commission and correct statistics is a must !

jmcc said:

The Junk Dump phase lasts for about five months after the anniversary of the landrush in any TLD. Thus the Junk Dump phase for .eu is from April 2007 to about August 2007.

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As I remember, the most .eu domains (around 2 Mio.) were registered in the beginning (April/May/June 2006) and they are renewed already ! The later registrations weren`t not so speculative and are much mor stabile.

Regards Enzy

Enzyklop said:

www.greenpeace.eu
www.milka.eu
www.Versace.eu
www.Politikporal.eu
www.starter-portal.eu
www.biokorn.eu

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Amazingly, this is the first time I have actually viewed an .eu site.

Nearly all (including your listing of greenpeace) is a redirect to an existing site (greenpeace.org).

The .eu registration was so poorly handled and monitored that it may take years to straighten out. Thousands of names were seized by a few fake registrars in the UK.

I have not seen any updates lately but there were nearly 300,000 in contention or had legal battles brewing with about 12 front companies operating in the US and illegally registering .eu (mostly LLL and NNN)

Enzyklop said:

Every domain which is is or was in quarantine, is deleted form the statistic - around 200.000 !

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The real figure is probably closer to 300K since .eu was around 2.6M at the start of April 2007. I saw 268K or so drop in April (based on the lists here - approximately 2.1M .eu domains monitored). I've been tracking .eu across the nameservers since April last year.

The .eu is no tropical garden until now, o.k., but also no desert. There are already some websites - for example:

www.greenpeace.eu
www.milka.eu
www.Versace.eu
www.Politikporal.eu
www.starter-portal.eu
www.biokorn.eu

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Still only a handful versus millions of parked and PPCed domains. And some of those are just portal/information sites rather than pureplays using the .eu as their primary brand. Greenpeace forwards to the greenpeace.org site. There is very little end user activity in .eu ccTLD - people and businesses are just sticking with .com and their ccTLDs.

The use of the .eu shows the growing DNS queries. There were 22962 DNS queries per minute in Dec 2006, in April only 3303 !

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In April 2006, there were only a few thousand domains active before the landrush. And I think that EURid was still using the .be nameservers at that stage so a lot of traffic might have ended up going to the .be nameservers.

The Big Junk Dump is over , I think - the registrations went from around 2 375 000 to 2 388 332 last week. I ecspected much more drops.. around 25 % (= 500.000), but now it`s only 10 %.

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The problem is that that drop figure is offset against the number of new registrations. The main drop for April is over but there is the drop for May, June, July to happen as well.

Hmm...I don't think that the .eu statistic is a fake or not trustworthy - because the .eu is under the patronage of the EU Commission and correct statistics is a must !

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The EU Commission are not domain business experts. Even the EU Commissoner responsible was telling the press that 2.5 million users registered the .eu domains. She was contradicted by EURid's own statistics.

The EURid report was a pathetic attempt to obfuscate the numbers by attempting to relate them to the population of each country. What EURid was really trying to do was hide the fact that most of .eu is really warehoused due to its incompetence in handling the landrush and bogus registrars. Over 54% of .eu is warehoused/aggregated according to EURid's report (that's one figure that they didn't manage to hide). And that doesn't even include the tens of thousands of domains that are potentially fraudulently registered or cybersquatted. The report doesn't mention the hundreds of thousands of domains potentially facing legal action.

A significant part of the UK .eu holding is due to warehousers/aggregators. Perhaps more than 90% of the Cyprus holding is warehoused/aggregated/squatted. A very significant part of the Dutch holding is due to the number of warehoused/aggregated domains. It really isn't a very healthy ccTLD.

The funniest part of all this was that EURid was sued by the Ovidio syndicate for breaching its own regulations. EURid actually lost because it knocked out the Ovidio registrars' access to the registry before notifying the Ovidio registrars. Not something that would inspire confidence in EURid's management or its legal team. And as for its eligibility department - these bozos couldn't even take action against blatently fraudulent registrations even when they are given them.

EURid lied to the press about there being a problem with phantom registrars. What makes you think that they wouldn't lie about statistics that makes their operation look bad? EURid had the power to solve the problem but its incompetent management did nothing.

Personally, I think that there should be a public investigation into how EURid got the contract, who on the EU Commission made the decision, and the level of expertise of those who advised them. If any evidence of wrongdoing is detected, then criminal prosecutions of those involved must follow. Perhaps that may restore some public confidence in .eu ccTLD. Though I think that the only thing that will restore confidence is a redelegation to a competent registry operation.

There are no grounds to trust the accuracy of EURid's statistics without an independent and competent audit. It allows warehouser/cybersquatter operations to hide domains by removing the nameservers from them - this means that up to 20% or more of .eu is hidden. There has been no independent and competent audit of .eu zone. There has been no independent and competent audit of EURid and its ability. There has been no competent oversight of the .eu ccTLD.

As I remember, the most .eu domains (around 2 Mio.) were registered in the beginning (April/May/June 2006) and they are renewed already ! The later registrations weren`t not so speculative and are much mor stabile.

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The .eu ccTLD didn't go through the 2M barrier until July 2006 or so. The later registrations (May, June, July) have not been renewed yet. The first landrush domains have but around 300K have dropped. The landrush period carried on for about three or so months. The warehousers/aggregators did renew a lot of their domains so what appears as stability may actually be something completely different. It could be that a lot of the small business registrants are dropping .eu and concentrating on their primary .com or ccTLD. I've just taken a quick look at dropped Irish .eu domains and there is a lot of business type .eu domains being dropped.

Regards...jmcc

Nice info in this thread, thanks all, rep added.

So are there any lists of expiring/expired .eu names available anywhere on the Web?

circa1850 said:

Amazingly, this is the first time I have actually viewed an .eu site. Nearly all (including your listing of greenpeace) is a redirect to an existing site (greenpeace.org). )

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greenpeace.eu was connected - but now it's only a redirect. But there are already a lot of .eu pages - specially small and median companies, and a lot in east-europe, like www.biocorn.eu.

circa1850 said:

The .eu registration was so poorly handled and monitored that it may take years to straighten out. Thousands of names were seized by a few fake registrars in the UK.

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True and there was a big frustration. But .eu will be a good TLD in the domain world, maybe only because of the big EU Market with 490 mio. customers in 27 countries under the same rules. Concering the fake registars there will be a court decision.

The eurid statistic is now already 2 392 330 ! :bingo:

" 6 .eu Landrush II domains and more than 23360 deleted domains
becoming FREE from 22.05. - 28.05.! (List is online in our customer area)"

Josh_1 said:

So are there any lists of expiring/expired .eu names available anywhere on the Web?

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You can get a list from http://realtime.at/index-en.php

best regards

Enzyklop said:

True and there was a big frustration. But .eu will be a good TLD in the domain world, maybe only because of the big EU Market with 490 mio. customers in 27 countries under the same rules. Concering the fake registars there will be a court decision.

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I think that EURid's management and legal team was incompetent enough to be beaten by the Ovidio syndicate in a very simple manner. That's why I don't think that these fools will do much to stop warehousing or cybersquatting. EURid is only taking action against one operation. It is probably stupid enough to lose that as well.

The eurid statistic is now already 2 392 330 ! :bingo:

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Yes but look at the individual country stats. Some of them are going down.

" 6 .eu Landrush II domains and more than 23360 deleted domains
becoming FREE from 22.05. - 28.05.! (List is online in our customer area)"

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I would not be surprised to see Snapnames, Pool and Nameintelligence trying to get in on the drop catching act.

Regards...jmcc

IAmAllanShore said:

Thanks, jmcc - good points and well reasoned. :tu:
Would love comps on other ccTLD drops, but don't bust your back doing it, it was only to satisfy my curiosity
-Allan :gl:

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I also would be interested in real ccTLD dumps - I suspect actual country code extensions show a MUCH smaller rate and volume of dumps!
I would rather have my country code then say a 'North American' semi-cctld and I am sure our friends in the US would agree.
The future (besides .com) will be in the hands of true ccTLDs, its our nature.

DomainLobe said:

I also would be interested in real ccTLD dumps - I suspect actual country code extensions show a MUCH smaller rate and volume of dumps!

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For .ie (Ireland) the figures do show a more sedate pattern. The domains are checked on the first day of each month. At 20061201 the number of .ie domains was 70084. The January figures are low because the IEDR (the .ie registry) was closed for the Christmas holidays from the 22nd of December. There is a very slight element of reregistration of dropped domains but the .ie ccTLD is a managed ccTLD and registrants have to prove entitlement to the requested .ie domain.

Jan2007 Del: 621 Transfers: 511 New: 1317 Total: 70783
Feb2007 Del: 659 Transfers: 706 New: 2326 Total: 72448
Mar2007 Del: 469 Transfers: 749 New: 2303 Total: 74283
Apr2007 Del: 768 Transfers: 754 New: 2609 Total: 76121
May2007 Del: 690 Transfers: 683 New: 2139 Total: 77576

The monthly deletion percentage is roughly just under 1% on average.

I would rather have my country code then say a 'North American' semi-cctld and I am sure our friends in the US would agree.
The future (besides .com) will be in the hands of true ccTLDs, its our nature.

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There are more Irish owned .com/net/org/biz/info domains than there are Irish owned .ie domains. This is due to the historically poor management of .ie ccTLD. However over recent years, the IEDR has become more efficient and answerable to the Irish internet industry. The .ie ccTLD has largely been a business ccTLD as the costs of obtaining a .ie, compared to a .com, were high. I think that the drop factor might be, partially, a function of the difficulty of obtaining a domain in a ccTLD. The more hoops that have to be jumped through, the more likely that the domain will be held. That 1% or so drops in .ie ccTLD may be more due to natural attrition (businesses going bust etc).

Regards...jmcc

Great info jmcc!
Thanks for sharing :tu:

Thanks JMCC - I appreciate your time addressing this question.
I supect the .ie perspective is reflected amongst other established ccTLDs as well.