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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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