Bob Parsons has an interesting post on his blog concerning the recently opened registration of the .eu domain.
On the one hand, I can understand how trying to manage a registry with over 450 million potential applicants could be troublesome, however they seem to have made a number of fundamental mistakes.
The first thing I don’t understand is why would you allow companies outside of the EU to become a registrar for .eu domains? Surely if the domains can only be registered by entities residing in the EU, that should apply to the whole process. Admittedly, I (unsuccessfully) attempted to register a domain through GoDaddy, this was because they are the largest, and competitively priced registrar. In any case, the registrars should have been more thoroughly vetted.
The process in which a request is made to the registry doesn’t really make sense either. In a perfect world maybe, if you could trust the registrars and registrants. Unfortunately, that perfect world doesn’t exist. I realise that it isn’t feasible to have registrations submitted to the registry as soon as the order is placed, the EURid site was already straining under the traffic. But surely somebody could come up with a way which is fair to everybody, although with the EU’s love affair with red tape and bureaucrats, maybe not.
I completely agree with his suggestions in order to at least go some way to ‘fix’ these problems, with one addition: Hold registrars responsible for domains registered by non-EU citizens/businesses.
Only time will tell whether the .eu domain will be a success or just a haven for spammers and squatters, but so far the future doesn’t seem too bright. 