jmcc

It looks like the Junk Dump is happening with .eu ccTLD. Thousands of .eu domains are being moved into quarantine every hour now. It will be interesting to see what will be left of this joke of an extension with the smoke clears. The UK has lost about 85K of its .eu registrations (approx 19%) so far. I'm not sure yet what impact this has on the value of .eu domains.

Regards...jmcc

EG.domains

still nobody can register .eu if he isn't European ?

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jmcc

Hasn't stopped thousands of people. Technically there is a nexus requirement but some of the warehousers have used UK and Cyprus based front companies to get around the nexus requirement.

Regards...jmcc

abdussamad

What is a junk dump?

jmcc

Basically people register all sorts of domains in a landrush in the hope of selling them or developing them. But when it comes up to the time for the first renewal (anniversary of the landrush), the domains that could not be sold or developed tend to be dumped as junk domains.

This Junk Dump phase can shrink a TLD by about 25% to 50% after the first year. Right now it is at 10% with .eu but it will increase over the next few days.

Regards...jmcc

Spade

Wow..... talk about not having as good a year as last year.... Thank goodness for them domains have almost no overhead costs.

Justin

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jmcc

It is heading close to 100K now for dropped UK .eu domains. But Some of them are squatted/warehoused domains regged by front companies in the UK. Even so the rate at which domains are being dumped is amazing. The core EU countries are dropping them quicker. Poland just dumped about 5K of them. Ireland is dumping about 20% of its holding as well (about 6K already). It isn't a collapse yet but if this rate of loss keeps up, .eu will be only equal to .biz in a few weeks or so.

Regards...jmcc

stub

I let ALL my .eu domains expire. I picked up about 50 adult domains with good keywords when the registry opened it's doors to normal people. I got carried away coz they were so easy to find with good keywords. Traffic was non-existant. (alright, alright, I know the cardinal rule about not parking new domains). I guess all those Europeans still get their titilation from the .com's I couldn't justify holding/developing them for the long haul.

zoki

but there was, for example something good for me,

long time ago have seen domain name *.eu on sedo and i was
interested in it, so if i asked a buyer .. maybe 200 eur or more,

some weeks/months later it was quarantained and dropd so i get
them for about 10 eur

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zehrila

In past few hours time i have seen a massive drop of over 50k domains and it looks like its going to go under 2 million.

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jmcc

Between 29/April and 30/April, over 65K .eu domains were moved to quarantine or dropped. If the .eu ccTLD goes below 2M, it will be very serious for EURid and the European Commission. Though interestingly, I noticed that about 10K of one squatter operation's (Kurt Janusch/XSS.RO) domains had apparently dropped or gone into quarantine. (I have to verify this yet but the domains I checked are all in quarantine.)

Regards...jmcc

Sam

jmcc interesting indeed. The .eu fiasco coming into light. Crumble Crumble

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zoki

why .eu fiasco ?
I don't see anything false on that.

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jmcc

Yep damitssam. Though I think that Eurid is hoping to sweep all that controversy under the carpet with the name drops. Over 65K domains were wiped out on the 30th of April alone. The deletion process seems to have stopped on the Eurid page. The sooner there is a criminal investigation of the whole .eu ccTLD Sunrise and Landrush process the better.

Regards...jmcc

The Sunrise was squatted to hell with bogus Belgian fast track trademarks and dodgy front companies. The rights validation operation PwC BE did not do a good job. 80% of UK and Irish businesses did not get their .eu in Sunrise 2. Hundreds of thousands of domains were warehoused and squatted by non-EU players using phantom registrars and UK and Cyprus front companies. The EURid registry was so utterly incompetent that it was sued by one of these operators (Ovidio syndicate) and Eurid lost for breaking its own rules. These EURid morons failed to take action to stop the massive fraud in .eu ccTLD that led to the collapse of confidence in .eu amongst the European business community. The .eu ccTLD is regarded as a joke in Europe. That's the .eu fiasco in a nutshell.

Regards...jmcc

wot

Plain and simple - eurid have only themselves to blame for destroying their own, and what had the potential to be a good extension.

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jmcc

The hard part is trying to figure out if the crap software Eurid uses for registry operations is doing the deletions/quarantining in batches or in real time. Over 65K .eu doms were d/qed yesterday and at least 260K have been d/qed since the beginning of April. I have grave reservations about the accuracy of EURid's published figures and I think that the auto-renewal thing is going to hit a lot of domainers in the next few weeks.

Regards...jmcc

UKZJ007

Ooops, I just realised all my .eu domains have been dropped too - even the very good ones.

sdsinc

Oh it will go under 2M. The junk dump is a good thing.
Then it will grow again - albeit at a slower pace.
Just like .info at some stage they were being given away for free.
I believe .eu is here to stay but you are right to say the bad handling by eurid has got .eu a tarnished reputation. And with the warehousing of good names there is little incentive for developing domains.
I read that even PWC has failed its own .eu application the first time...

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gazzip

Is there anywhere you can see which ones are getting dumped ?

I renewed the majority of my ones I still have faith it will get better once the dust settles and even if it does'nt one of them is paying for all the others so I'll just have to develop some more !


.

jmcc

Yep but that slower pace could take about five years or so. It seems to be deleting and quarantining in batches so it will probably take a while to go through the 2M mark.

I don't think that they were being given away for free initially. But even that might be necessary to restore some kind of growth.

I am tempted to post lists of the domains warehoused and the identity of the warehousers. One of them has been acting all high and mighty about domain squatting matters recently and he and his buddy have been identified in ADRs (.eu WIPOs) as cybersquatters/warehousers and have lost a few ADRs.

Even worse than that, approximately 80% of the UK and Irish companies and businesses that applied for their trade name as a domain did not get it in Sunrise 2. That killed it in the two main English language markets in Europe.

Regards...jmcc

Well XSS.RO has taken serious hits. That's the Kurt Janusch operation in Romania. The Westerdal/King operation has been trying to hide its domains by removing the dns from them. (name-services.com lost about 35K .eu domains so they are split between Westerdal/King and genuine registrants - the bulk are W/K). Enom has a pile there from its EU front operation as well. I'm still working on the breakdowns across the other hosters.

There is very little natural development in .eu at the moment. Indeed the problem has been that there has been no big pureplay in .eu using .eu as its primary brand. The bozos in Brussels with their europa.eu.int to europa.eu flip do not count.

Regards...jmcc

Enzyklop

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

jmcc

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.

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.

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.

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 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

IAmAllanShore

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

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jmcc

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 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

IAmAllanShore

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

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