Enzyklop said:
Every domain which is is or was in quarantine, is deleted form the statistic - around 200.000 !
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
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 !
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 %.
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 !
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.
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
