As you might have heard, there will soon come a new international Top Level Domain (TLD) Europe and the EU that is called .eu. There are many speculations around the net, whether the new upcoming .eu damin is going to be a new kind of .com domain. In other words: Is it going to be comparable importent as the .com, that represent 41 mill. of 57 mill. active gTLD’s (source: Whois Sources Domain Counts and Internet Statistic)? It is hard to say, but one must remember that there are many interest in creating a hysteria about how importent it is for companies and people to register this new domain. Such a hysteria can make a lot of money, especially with the all the good .com storys in mind.

But if one thinks psycologically about it, maybe it will not be that huge succes after all. The .eu domain is kind of sitting down between the chairs. It is not an international domain appealing to the whole world, nor is it appealing to the as a national domain. The failure in popularity of the american .us domain could be a possible scenario of how it would go with the .eu domain. The statistics show, that the .us domain, with its less than 900,000 active domains, is even far behind the failures of .biz and .info.

So, when will you be able to by a new .eu domain, and is there a possibility to grab an attractive one right after the launch? By now the introduction af the new domain has been postponed for some years allready, but it seems like it will be realeased in the 4th quater of 2005. Eurid.eu has the following timetable for launch:

“4th Quarter 2005 (we do not have an exact date yet)
Start phase 1 of sunrise
(public bodies and holders of trademarks may apply for the corresponding name)

Start of sunrise + 2 months
Start phase 2 of sunrise period (those eligible to apply in phase 1 plus holders of other rights recognised in the national law of a member state may apply for the corresponding name)

Start of sunrise + 4 months
Sunrise period closes and registrations open on a first-come-first-served basis.
Validation of names applied for during sunrise continues until task completed”

A sunrise period means a kind of closed registration period with special rules.

To summarize:

It seems that you have to be living in or having business in the EU.

Now, where can you register? Eurid.eu has this list of accredited registrars.

Note that EURid is already using a .eu domain.

Today I just realised that it is possible to register Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) names for the TLD .org. This happend on the following dates:

Danish 23-Jul-2005
German 15-Jan-2005
Hungarian 23-Jul-2005
Icelandic 23-Jul-2005
Korean 23-Jul-2005
Latvian 23-Jul-2005
Lithuanian 23-Jul-2005
Polish 23-Jul-2005
Swedish 23-Jul-2005

See more information on www.pir.org.
The following registrars sell IDN names:

Tucows Inc. (Canada) domainhelp.tucows.com
CSL Computer Service Langenbach GmbH d/b/a joker.com (Germany) www.joker.com
Key-Systems GmbH (Germany) www.domaindiscount24.com
PSI-USA, Inc. dba Domain Robot (United States) www.psi-usa.info
Ascio Technologies, Inc. (Denmark) www.ascio.com
NetBenefit plc aka NetNames (United Kingdom) www.netnames.co.uk
Deutsche Telekom AG (Germany) www.registrar.telekom.de
Active 24 ASA (Norway) www.activeisp.com
Secura GmbH (Germany) www.domainregistry.de
007Names, Inc. (United States) www.007names.com

Just after having discoverd about the .org name I found out that it also is possible to register german IDN’s for .info and .biz.

For .com, .net and many ccTLD’s it has been possible to register TLD’s for a while.

For looking up a domain, the website Whois Source is an exellent tool. You can:

1. Make domain name spinning, wich proposes similar free domains.
2. Explore domains wich are partly registered (some of the gTLD’s).
3. See where the domain you are interested in is for sale.
4. Sign up for a free account, and make your own mintoring list over all the domains you are interested in. Then you can get an email every time one of these domains change registration status.

The best about Whois Source is, that the overall lookups are shown grafically very nice with information about registration status and activity. And when you click on the more specific domain, you see a lot usefull information about it.

By the way: The .sc in whois.sc means Seychelles. See my list of TLD’s.

Try it out here:

Whois look-up on your browser link bar:

By placing this link (Whois)
in your link bar, you will be able to lookup the whois on any domain
while you are visiting them. To use, just click on the link while at
the other site and it will show you the whois information. To install
this link, This link must be dragged to the link bar. Once installed
you don’t have to leave a website to see who owns it.

Why hire expensive consultants when you need advice or get problems solved? At the domain forums you have huge and updated knowledge from all over the world. And the experts work for you for free and around the clock. Remember to seach the forums before posting a question. Very often the subject has allready been discussed.

dnforum.com “The place to talk domains” - 60-70,000 threads.
namepros.com “Buy, sell, discuss domain names” - 60,000 threads.
webhostingtalk.com Huge forum about webhosting, but also allmost 150,000 threads about domain names.
sitepoint.com Webmasterforum with allmost 7,000 about domain names.
webmasterworld.com Giant webmaster forum with more than 1,700,000 threads - more than 43,000 about domain names.

Here three nice and free tools in your hunt for nice domain names.

Domain Name Analyzer (DNA) (Freeware!) makes it possible to check the availability of a large list of domain names. A cool thing is that you also can construct lists of domain names with this tool and you can also costumize it to check specific countrys domains. The only disadvantage is that the specific whois can block your IP when you make too many checks. I think I experienced that the .com whois blocked me after app. 3600 checks. And the .dk whois blocks me after 360 checks. Then you have to wait for an hour, and you can go ahead.

Domain Name Filter (Freeware!) makes it possible to filter large lists of domain names.

Domain Name Status Reporter (Freeware!) obtains and monitors the registry status (active, registrar-lock, registrar-hold, etc), created, updated and expiry dates of global top level domains (com, Net, org, Edu, Biz and Info).

Rumors say that the new Internet Explorer (IE 7.0) from Microsoft is supporting Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). This means that IDN domain names will increase there value very much. Most internet users use IE for browsing, and without explicit downloading this plugin, they will not find websites using IND. That IE doesn’t support IDN names like Firefox, Mozilla and Opera makes them pretty useless so far, so the IE 7.0 is good news for IDN owners in many countrys.

The launch of IE 7.0 is expected within 6 months. But the disadvantage by IDN names is still, that many people will be using an older IE for quite some time, and that they don’t realy work for emails.