Over 2.5 million registrations were made during the first year of opening to the public (EU residents and organizations having a registered office on EU territory) of the European Internet domain “.eu”, by now the third most popular top level domain in Europe and the seventh in the world. Strongest demand for the European web address has come from Germany with 31%, followed by the UK (17%) and Holland (12%), and this in spite of the continuous and parallel increase in applications for national domains (such as “.it”, “.fr”, “.nl”). “It’s a positive sign of the attractiveness of electronic commerce in the EU”, said the European Commissioner for the Information Society and the Media Viviane Reding. She congratulated “EURid as the independent not-for-profit registry responsible for .eu, for successfully managing the extremely high demand from industry and the public and for helping us to deploy Europe’s identity online”. Reding also welcomed “the recent efforts made by EURid to make .eu-registrations swifter, safer and cheaper”. A further source for satisfaction is the low number of litigation cases brought before the Czech Arbitration Court in Prague, “underlining the sound procedures being followed by EURid to manage .eu”. “At present – said Reding – almost 80%of all .eu domain names lead to a functioning website or an email server”.
