Pan-European .eu domain turns five

The European Commission has been talking up the success of the .eu domain which turned five years old on Thursday and has reached almost 3.5 million registrations.

The domain is now the ninth biggest top level domain on the internet, and the fifth most popular country code, and registrations have doubled over the five-year period, according to registry EURid.

"Steady growth since then has reinforced .eu's position as one of the world's 10 largest top-level domains," said Marc Van Wesemael, general manager of EURid.

"This proves that .eu gives companies an effective means to present themselves online as open for business across Europe."

Despite a strong home-grown domain in .uk, take up in this country is the third largest in Europe, behind the Netherlands and Germany. The domain has been heavily promoted by the EU as a way for smaller businesses to raise their profile in other European markets.

"I am particularly pleased to see that .eu is ever more popular among small and medium-sized enterprises that wish to gain better visibility in Europe's single market," said Digital Agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes.

"Having a .eu web presence gives individuals and companies a European identity and is instantly recognised by potential customers across all borders."

The domain has also embraced Icann's push towards internationalised domain names, allowing for the use of special letters such as é, ö č as well as non-Latin scripts such as the Cyrillic ю, or the Greek ε.

However, it has not all been plain sailing for the domain over the past five years and some may argue that just 3.5 million registrations in a market as large as Europe is poor progress.

The domain was hit by controversy in its launch year when it was forced to suspend over 70,000 names after hundreds of US registrars had stockpiled them with a view to selling them on at a profit.

In the following year EURid had to suspend another 10,000 names after they had been registered by cybersquatters.

V3.co.uk interviewed EURid general manager van Wesemael last year.