ccTLDs.com » Country Code Specific Forums » .eu Forum

[jmcc]

Originally Posted by mvl

That is a big accusation.

Does Ovidio Limited ring any bells? What about the Blogdo.com affair with a Chinese national, (Zheng) claiming UK domicile to cybersquat thousands of EU company and business names? What about fraudulently registered domains with US addresses including zipcodes but with Eastern European countries in the country field?

I have attended the Brussels roadshow preceding the sunrise and landrush periods and been involved professionally during those sunrise and landrush periods and I witnessed what happened from the inside.

So you attended Eurid's little song and dance show. It is my opinion that Eurid has made a complete mess of .eu ccTLD. I've had to consult on ADRs and I would probably have a far better view of .eu and how fundamentally broken it is. As far as I know, there has only been one major .eu website survey. The analysis was, from what I remember, that 13.37% or so of .eu domains surveyed were actively developed (not parked/coming soon/warehoused/for sale etc).

In general: the rules were certainly bent, but not broken.

So why did the incompetents in Eurid take a court case against Ovidio Limited et al and completely mess it up by breaking Eurid's own regulations? Eurid tried to lie its way out of that by initially claiming that there was nothing wrong.

I just don't share your high opinion of Eurid. I wish the .eu ccTLD had been properly managed and far more successful. As you can probably guess, the .eu fiasco is a very emotive subject for some of us and opinions may differ.

Regards...jmcc

[mvl]

John, I know your opinions. You have written a lot about these cases in the past. But the fact remains that Eurid was not able to prove their allegations that Ovidio/Fausto/Gambino violated article 4 of the registrar agreement, because the regulations allowed for setting up different legal entities. The rules make it hard to prove warehousing not because it is not happening, but because it's not the registrar who is doing it. That's not Eurids fault but a weakness in the regulations. And yes I agree: they messed up when they tried to block the 74.000 Ovidio domains. Eurid have done a lot of stupid things, but the warehousing problems imo stem from bad regulations, not from bad registry management.

FYI: At that time I was head of tech dept at BliXem.

[bemarnet]

Be it whatever it is, it is a pity.
Let's do something positive to bring the .eu up again.

I think it is a very nice extension.

Maybe we can just do something now before the European elections ?

[jmcc]

Originally Posted by mvl

John, I know your opinions. You have written a lot about these cases in the past. But the fact remains that Eurid was not able to prove their allegations that Ovidio/Fausto/Gambino violated article 4 of the registrar agreement, because the regulations allowed for setting up different legal entities.

From what I recall, Eurid took action against the Ovidio registrars before notifying them and that was against the regulations. The court ruled that Eurid had to restore access and remove the hold from the domains. I haven't followed the case closely since then but Ovido has dropped about 30K .eu domains over the past few years.

The rules make it hard to prove warehousing not because it is not happening, but because it's not the registrar who is doing it. That's not Eurids fault but a weakness in the regulations.

Some of the paperwork I've checked shows links between registrars and registrants that might be quite acceptable to a court. There is a lack of motivation in Eurid to do anything about this problem because it would look very bad if it had to delete domains.

And yes I agree: they messed up when they tried to block the 74.000 Ovidio domains. Eurid have done a lot of stupid things, but the warehousing problems imo stem from bad regulations, not from bad registry management.

Eurid looks like a small ccTLD registry (it really is an offshoot of DNS.be) playing with what is in reality a gTLD. It never had the expertise or the understanding of what .eu meant to people in the EU and when the business names, company names and trademarks of small businesses in the EU started getting cyberwarehoused and cybersquatted on a massive scale, it effectively killed .eu as a viable ccTLD. The small businesses, more than the large brandnames are what create growth in a ccTLD. Without a solid base of these small businesses, the ccTLD loses credibility. The best analogy would be the .biz gTLD. It was supposed to be the extension for businesses but it drifted and now it is effectively a third or fourth choice extension in Europe and very few businesses use it as their primary brand. The only things that seem to be keeping .eu alive are German registrations, Eastern European registrations and brand protection registrations. In Ireland and the UK, .eu is often not even considered an essential registration.

FYI: At that time I was head of tech dept at BliXem.

Ah. Then you really did have an inside view.

Regards...jmcc

[mvl]

Originally Posted by jmcc

From what I recall, Eurid took action against the Ovidio registrars before notifying them and that was against the regulations. The court ruled that Eurid had to restore access and remove the hold from the domains.

That court ruling was about the fact that Eurid had blocked 74.000 domains and not followed the right procedures to do so, but it was not a ruling about the warehousing accusations.

[Tom]

Ovidio came up with a way to get around the rules, and the people complaining the most are domainers who wanted to register the domain themselves but failed to. I call that envy, not cheating. I do not approve it, but face it, they just beat us and yes that stings...

The fact that there are assumed links between agents and licensees really does not make a lot of difference in this case. If you file a complaint, they can only penalize the registrar, not the licensee, as it is the agent contract that disallows warehousing, not the licensee contract. If the agent would not comply within reasonable time, the agent contracts would be terminated, and the licensee would have to find a new agent for his domains. (and since they really don't need all the agent accounts anymore, they probably wouldn't even mind)

As for the business/company/trademark names of small companies beeing warehoused, this would have happend anyway, even if it wasn't for Ovidio and co. If your company had a strong (generic/semi-generic) name, chances are big that some other domainer beat you to it.

[jmcc]

Originally Posted by mvl

That court ruling was about the fact that Eurid had blocked 74.000 domains and not followed the right procedures to do so, but it was not a ruling about the warehousing accusations.

The full case was to be heard later but I am not sure what happened with it. The fact that Ovidio dropped so many domains was interesting as I think many of them ended up parked on Sedo. Pool.com also dropped a lot of its domains that it had registered through its UK front company for "clients" in its auctions.

Regards...jmcc

[blacknight]

I feel sorry for Eurid.

They made a lot of mistakes, but I also know that they were severely hampered (and still are) by the agreements / contract that they have with the EU

It will be an uphill struggle for them to successfully market .eu as an alternative to .com (or a cctld)

As John points out, there was a lot of messy registrations, weird sunrise processes etc. that left a really bad taste in people's mouths.

I honestly can't think of a single big brand that is using a .eu as their main website

The bulk of .eu registrations that we handled initially were defensive and I think a lot of them still are.

On the plus side other registries have been able to learn from mistakes made

[Brands-and-Jingles]

At Brands-and-Jingles, partners see it as .com being the best for the business, but difficult to find a good one these days, so many European businessman are find with .eu - no limit on the market and jingles well.

This is probably why .eu has enjoyed substantial growth in the last six months.

Cheers!

[icen2345]

Originally Posted by mvl

The .eu market is huge and growing as new countries join the European Union. And because trade barriers within the EU are slowly being eliminated, a European focus will become more and more important for companies in those countries, on the long term maybe just as important as a national focus. Therefore I think .eu has a very bright future, although it might not be a tld for a quick flip.

I very much agree; I think .eu will be much stronger in the future and it's a good long term investment. Improving the reliability of the EUrid registry would also help a lot.

[jmcc]

The problem with .eu ccTLD is credibility. It has none. Apart from the transnational companies who use .eu to trade between countries in the EU, there is very little usage and development of .eu as a natural option for EU businesses. The prefer their local ccTLD and most do not export. Over the last few years, there has been a pattern of small businesses dropping their .eu domain to concentrate on their local ccTLD or .com brand.

The .eu is becoming popular in the Eastern Europe states as it has effectively replaced .com as the alternative to the local ccTLD. However the history of ccTLD evolution shows that when the management of these local ccTLD registries (typically ccTLD registries are developed from universities initially and have very little business expertise) is replaced by a more business orientated management, the ccTLD will grow rapidly and begin to eclipse the .com usage as more local businesses and users focus on the local ccTLD. This marginalisation will happen to .eu in these countries too.

The biggest mistakes that the European Commission made were not designing the regulatory framework properly and giving the .eu ccTLD to DNS.be to run. It will take years to overcome the damage caused by those two mistakes - that's if .eu ccTLD is to become anything other than a third choice TLD in the EU.

Regards...jmcc

[Brands-and-Jingles]

All said is true. .EU enjoys nice pace of growth and popularity. However practical.ly no names are left so why bother and not to stick with .com?

The only reason is that, so far, .eu goes a bit cheap.ly. But then big fishes do not buy things cheap.ly anyway.