To better serve the .eu market and improve its market knowledge, EURid, the .eu registry, has gained four additional members.

The new members – all associations with a strong Internet-oriented vision which are active on a European level – include:

• The Confederation of Computer User Associations (CECUA)
• The European Communities Trade Mark Association (ECTA)
• The European Multi-Channel Online Trade Association (EMOTA)
• The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (IAB Europe)

“We are pleased to welcome the representatives of these organisations as we believe we can benefit significantly from the extensive experience they have in their fields,” said EURid’s General Manager Marc Van Wesemael. “We look forward to further shifting our focus towards an all-inclusive view of the Internet, while at the same time staying rooted in the strong foundation of technical knowledge that we have built up through our cooperation with the founding members over the years.”

EURid was founded in 2003 by the three organisations running national domain registries for .be (Belgium), .it (Italy) and .se (Sweden). Later, the registries for .cz (the Czech Republic) and .si (Slovenia) became members, as did the European Chapters of the Internet Society (ISOC-ECC) and Business Europe. The Swedish registry ended its membership in April 2013.

“There is great potential at EURid to bring the technical and user sides of the internet closer together. In this, we welcome the fact that EURid is taking the necessary steps to expand its forum and bring in stakeholders from many different organisations and geographical locations.”
Jon Thorallsson, CECUA President

“In the internet marketplace, .eu managed by EURid, is perceived as a recognisable brand, with strong security and user loyalty. As such, EURid presents a qualified and unified forum to work towards harmonisation of online IP and trademark regulation.”
Massimo Cimoli, ECTA Vice Chair

“Europe is taking the lead in online commerce, but trust is still an issue for 57% of users. In our cooperation with EURid we see a lot of potential to work towards a safer marketplace online.”
Susanne Czech, EMOTA Secretary General

“This is a wake-up call to recognise the active role .eu can play in organising online Europe to welcome and at the same time foster global entrepreneurship. The next Zuckerberg will be European. For that to happen we need to be in contact with a broad range of stakeholders and, from this, take the lead. The history of the internet is not over yet.”
Alain Heureux, IAB Europe President

EURid, the .eu registry, just published the Q4 2012 progress report.

On average, 80% of .eu domain names were renewed in 2012, according to the latest progress report from the .eu registry EURid. This is the sixth year running that .eu has maintained such a high renewal rate, indicating that .eu domain name holders are a loyal group.

The top-level domain finished the quarter, and the year, with 3.7 million registrations – an annual growth of 5.4%.

“I consider a growth rate that is comparable to 2011 (5.5%) to be a notable achievement, particularly in light of the on-going global economic crisis,” commented EURid General Manager, Marc Van Wesemael.

During Q4 2012, there were 230 752 new .eu registrations. Of these, 7 184, or 3%, were multiyear registrations (registrations for two years or more). Compared with Q3 2012, the number of multiyear registrations increased by 46%, signifying that a growing number domain name holders plan to hold onto their .eu domains for the foreseeable future.

The total number of .eu registrations increased in 22 of the 27 EU Member States. Bulgaria, Belgium, Slovenia, Lithuania and Finland all saw growth of more than 5%.

Also in the report

EURid-UNESCO Insights report
In collaboration with UNESCO, EURid published a new Insights report titled, “The EURid-UNESCO world report on Internationalised Domain Names deployment 2012“. The report, which analyses the growth of multilingualism on the Internet and the factors that contribute towards that growth, including the use of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), can be downloaded at link.eurid.eu/insights.

Extended fee reduction for ADR procedures
On 18 December EURid announced that the fee for a basic .eu Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedure would continue to be cut by 50% until the end of 2013. The average number of ADR cases filed per month had risen 80% by the end of Q4 2012, following the introduction of the reduced fee in the beginning of Q3. This increase seems to indicate that there was some sort of financial barrier that prevented certain parties from claiming their rights through .eu ADR proceedings.

Updated transfer procedure
A revised transfer procedure was launched on 21 November 2012 to simplify domain name transfers for .eu registrars. The revised procedure is the result of an extensive internal and external enquiry and analysis of the most effective industry practices. It is similar to the procedures used by other registries, in that it adds a year to the current registration period.

The full report for Q4 2012 is available for download at http://link.eurid.eu/reports.

EURid just published “.eu identity” magazine for Spring 2013. The latest issue has some interesting articles such as the one where Digital strategist, William Deckers, reveals five unique advantages that Internet businesses have over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. And content expert, Anna Borsboom, gives us insights into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how you can use it to increase your website’s visibility.

The magazine also takes a look behind the scenes of TEDxBrussels to see what goes into organising this annual ideas-exchange event, which brings together thought-leaders from a variety of industries to share, inspire, innovate and effect change. It also features an article on how to get your business online.

EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names, manages the .eu top-level Internet domain under contract to the European Commission. EURid publishes the .eu identity magazine twice a year. The magazine contains articles on general interest and Internet-specific subjects. Click here to download the latest issue in .pdf format. You can find previous issues of the .eu Identity magazine in the magazine archive.

Ambitions to create a genuinely multilingual Internet are being frustrated by technical gridlocks and the solid dominance of Latin script and the English language. Internet domains offering content in local languages and scripts need to be more user friendly if they are to challenge English’s overwhelming domination of the online world, says a report to be presented on February 26 during a conference at UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters. Prepared jointly by UNESCO and EURid, the European registry of Internet Domain Names, it calls on governments and other Internet stakeholders to step up their efforts to remove current obstacles to more languages going online.

There is no reliable count of web pages in English but among users, 27% adopt English and 24% Chinese. An estimated 56% of web sites are in English.

English was entrenched as the founding language of the Internet by the Domain Names System (DNS) which accommodates hundreds of millions of web addresses around the globe. DNS was launched on the basis of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange which favours Latin script by only allowing the characters a-z, the numbers 0-9 and the hyphen.

With an eye on breaking out of this linguistic ghetto, technical standards were developed for Internationalised Domain Name (IDNs), allowing domain names to be written in non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic or Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Countries where IDNs are taking off are the Russian Federation, the Republic of Korea and China.

The Report criticises most of the 19 country code IDNs currently operating for failing to capture the public imagination. IDNs are not user friendly and do not work well for emails or even Facebook accounts, says the report.

EURid-UNESCO conclusions urge policy makers to regard the promotion and deployment of IDNs as a key component of digital literacy.