Dropped .eu Domain Names

HosterStats.com has published a graph of dropped .eu domain names from 2007 to 2011. The .eu ccTLD has always been a strange ccTLD. It was a good idea poorly implemented and until recently, EUrid had published very little in the way of accurate statistics on registration trends in the .eu ccTLD. Recently it added the numbers of new registrations per month to its statistics pages. Using these figures, HosterStats.com was able to estimate the numbers of dropped .eu domain names each month. The results show that unlike the .asia sTLD Landrush graph, there is a recurring high level of drops on the anniversary of the .eu ccTLD’s 2006 Landrush. With the .asia sTLD, the effects of the Landrush drops were concentrated in the two years after the launch. With .eu ccTLD, the effects of the Landrush drops are visible each year and in significant numbers.

This pattern goes right to the heart of the issue. The .eu ccTLD was the target of extremely high domain name speculation when launched and as a result, the countries of the European Union lost interest in the .eu ccTLD as a serious alternative to the local ccTLDs or .com TLD. Many of the highly speculative domain names that were registered in the .eu Landrush by non-EU operators using front companies in Cyprus, the UK, Luxembourg Gibraltar and Ireland boosted the .eu ccTLD’s registration volume but damaged .eu ccTLD as a trustworthy ccTLD for the European Union. The highly speculative element of a Landrush tends to drop from a healthy new TLD in the first two years after the Landrush. However this has not happened with .eu ccTLD and the effects of the Landrush are still being seen over five years later.