News 

Strato's CEO Damian Schmidt described British activity in the first five or six days of the sunrise period, when those with trademarks could pitch their claims early, as 'very low'. Subsequently, the UK claimed just 280,000 .eu domains as the TLD went live earlier last month, compared to Germany which led with 420,000.

The registration process itself was fraught with controversy, with some claiming that the system was being abused by companies setting up phantom registrars in order to submit domain claims multiple times hoping to improve their chances of a successful claim.

Schmidt said that he didn't believe such practices marred the fairness in how EuroID, the registry responsible for the TLD, dealt with the claims. He claimed Strato had around a 70 per cent success rate in getting the domains it wanted. But he said that these 'phantom' registrars were only successful some 30 per cent

ADVERTISEMENT

of the time.

There are now more than 1.8m .eu domains said Schmidt, making it 'the most successful TLD launch in history'.

Part of the need for .eu has been a political gambit to boost Europe's position in relation to the US. Schmidt said May had seen almost no .com activity as the rush for .eu got underway in earnest. But it appears it is in this respect where the UK has struggled.

'UK companies are more oriented to .com domains,' claimed Schmidt, rather than towards continental Europe, whereas European companies view Europe much more as a single market, making the .eu domain more significant.

Further evidence of this split is that of the 280,000 UK registrations of .eu domains, 220,000 were made by US registrars.

Not that there is anything wrong in that: the rules stipulate simply that the entity using the domain is based in the EU. However, it does effect the performance of websites when requests for those domains have to make transatlantic trips to resolve them.

Schmidt claims the latency affecting such websites could amount to as much as 60ms. This compares with 4ms for resolving within the EU. And with literally hundreds of elements on a web page, that can add up to a noticeable performance issue when it comes to hosting. Conversely, delivering pages from a domain hosted within the EU comes in at less than half a second - especially where both domain and site are hosted within the EU.

For more information on Strato, visit the Strato website.