EURid scraps residency rules for three countries

.eu registry EURid said today that it’s broadening the eligibility criteria for registrants to ex-pats from three countries.

The rule change means that if you’re a citizen of Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein but do not live in those countries or in the EU, you’ll be able to register domains regardless of residency.

Those three countries are in the European Economic Area but not the EU. EEA residents have been able to register .eu names for a long time, but non-resident citizens were barred.

The rule applying eligibility to citizenship rather than residency has been available to full-fat EU citizens since 2019.

The number of affected people appears to be low. The combined population of all three countries is under six million, almost all of whom are Norwegian, and Norway is believed to have 100,000 citizens living overseas.

Brexit-hit domains can still be recovered

EURid has removed thousands of .eu domain names belonging to UK registrants from its zone file, but has dangled the possibility that they could still be recovered.

Due to Brexit, the UK is no longer a member of the European Union and its companies and citizens are no longer eligible for .eu domains, and EURid has been warning them for years that their domains are in jeopardy.

The latest phase kicked in yesterday, when the affected names were moves from a “suspended” to a “withdrawn” status. They now no longer function on the internet.

They’ll be released back into the available pool of names in batches early next year.

But EURid is now saying that affected registrants may be able to recover their names if they email the registry directly with proof of compliance before December 31.

Registrants can comply with the eligibility policy if they’re EU citizens living in the UK or UK citizens legally resident in the EU.

According to EURid’s web site, about 3,500 .eu domains are currently registered in the UK, but it’s not clear whether that includes domains that were withdrawn this week.

In two weeks, Brits will lose their .eu domains forever

UK registrants of .eu domains have just two weeks left to bring their registrations into compliance or face losing their names forever.

EURid today sent out its final warning to its UK customers — update your records or have your domains placed into an unrecoverable “withdrawn” status, which means they’re removed from the zone file.

These domains have been in a “suspended” status since January, but still recoverable.

To come back into compliance, records will have to be updated to either a registrant based in the post-Brexit EU 27 member states, or an EU citizen based in the UK.

The deadline is June 30, with the withdrawal axe falling the following day.

EURid sells 1,369 Cyrillic names in five years

EURid, the .eu registry, says the Cyrillic version of its TLD has amassed just 1,369 domain registrations in its first five years of operations.

The internationalized domain name .ею is predominantly used in Bulgaria, the only EU nation where Cyrillic is the primary official script. EURid says that 51% of its .ею names have web sites in Bulgarian.

The headline number is pretty much unchanged from the year-ago figure, and is down from 1,699 at the end of June 2019.

There are 37,107 Latin-script .eu domains registered to Bulgarians today, according to the registry’s web site.

The Bulgarian ccTLD registry Register.bg runs .bg and the Cyrillic .бг, but does not publish registration statistics for either.

.eu’s only other IDN version, the Greek .ευ, has 2,708 registrations but launched much later, in 2019.

Greece has a population of around 10.7 million, compared to Bulgaria’s seven million.

EURid says that Bulgarian registrar SuperHosting.bg joined its Registrar Advisory Board earlier this year, and that it is introducing a “Best of .ею and .ευ” to its annual awards ceremony.

Brexit specter creeping up on .eu

The .eu ccTLD shrank a bit in the first quarter as a result of Brexit finally kicking in fully.

Registry EURid reported that there were 3,681,337 registered .eu, .ею and .ευ domains at the end of March, down from 3,684,984 at the end of 2020, a dip of just a few thousand names.

Domains registered by UK registrants, who are still grandfathered in for another couple of months, stood at 59,779 at the end of the quarter, down from 77,000 at the end of 2020.

The top-line numbers were also affected negatively by Portugal, which has seen its numbers up and down over the last couple of years due to a cycle of registrar promotions and deletions.

Under EURid rules, Brits and UK residents have until the end of June to make arrangements for their domains before they are deleted.

Because EU citizens living in the UK and elsewhere outside the EU are now eligible for .eu domains, EURid has started breaking out that number too. It was 15,308, more than names registered in Croatia and Latvia, among other nations.

The Brexit impact was tempered by strong sequential growth of 9.4% in Ireland, from 78,030 to 85,381 domains.

Given the shared border, language, and confusing/controversial current trading relationship between the UK and Ireland, I wonder whether any of this Irish growth can be attributed to some kind of Plastic Paddy effect, in much the same way as applications for Irish passports increased following the 2016 Brexit referendum.

In percentage terms, the place with the strongest .eu growth in Q1 was the French territory of Saint Martin, which DOUBLED(!) its total in the quarter, growing from 1 to 2.

EU cancels .eu tender after Brexit cock-up

The European Commission has been forced to cancel its search for a new .eu registry operator after apparently misunderstanding how Brexit works.

When the Commission put the .eu contract up for grabs last October, it said deal was only open to organizations based in the EU or the UK.

It seemed weird at the time, given that the UK had already officially left the EU and was just a few months away from terminating its year-long transition agreement, under which it still operated as if it were still a member.

And it turns out to have been a mistake, based on a misunderstanding of the legalities of the Brexit process. UK registries should never have been allowed to bid in the first place.

The Commission said today “the inclusion of the clause for applicants established in the United Kingdom in the Call was an error”.

It’s therefore scrapped the entire process and intends to relaunch it “in the near future”.

Only not-for-profit entities may apply.

.eu is currently managed by EURid, which is of course not barred from bidding to renew its longstanding contract.

Brit .eu owners get another three-month stay of execution

EURid, the .eu registry, has given UK-based registrants another three months to reclaim their suspended .eu domains.

The transition period governing Brexit ended with 2020, and with it UK citizens’ right to own a .eu domain. The registry suspended 80,000 names as a result.

These domains were due to be deleted at the end of March and released for re-registration by eligible registrants next year.

But EURid has now extended that deadline to the end of June.

Anecdotally, the New Year purge caused a flood of customer support inquiries at registrars, as registrants who somehow missed EURid’s repeated warnings tried to figure out why their domains no longer resolved.

Registrants can keep a hold of their domains if they move them to a registrant with an EU address, or if they declare themselves an EU citizen living in the UK.

EURid reports 3% growth in final quarter before Brexit crunch

The .eu ccTLD grew by 108,682 domains in the fourth quarter of 2020, the last reporting period before the full impact of Brexit is felt.

The registry said this week that it ended December with 3,684,984 names under management, a number which also includes .ею and .ευ. That’s a 3% increase over the three months.

Portugal was the big driver, due to local registrar promotions. It was up 64.8% sequentially and 116% year-over-year. Portuguese registrants owned 105,895 names at the end of the year.

The Q4 numbers show 77,000 names registered to UK registrants and do not reflect the impact of the Brexit transition, which ended at the end of the year.

EURid said last month that it had suspended around 80,000 domains belonging to about 48,000 registrants, as the UK fell out of eligibility.

Some of those will likely be recovered during Q1, as UK-resident EU citizens are still eligible for .eu domains.

EURid suspends 80,000 domains as Brexit transition ends

EURid suspended about 80,00 domain names on Friday, as the UK’s 11 months of Brexit transition came to an end.

All the names were registered to UK-based, non-EU citizens and organizations, which are no longer eligible under registry policy.

“On 1 January 2021 we suspended around 80 000 domain names and send out just over 48 000 notifications to the registrants,” a registry spokesperson told DI today.

From Friday, the domains have not been resolvable, meaning email, web sites and other services using those names are no longer functional.

Affected registrants have a few months to get their records in order, if they wish to to keep them, by transferring them to a EU-based registrant or informing their registrar they’re an EU citizen living in the UK.

They’ll have until a minute before midnight CET March 31 to make the change. A minute later, the domains will move from “suspended” status to “withdrawn” status, at which point they will become unrecoverable.

Withdrawn domains will become available for registration again in 2022.

.eu had 130,114 UK-registered names at the end of September, suggesting about 50,000 domains were relocated at the eleventh hour, despite the eligibility policy being publicized for at least a couple of years.

Losing 80,000 names from its register would mean about a 2.2% decline in overall .eu regs compared to the end of the third quarter.

The UK officially left the EU at the end of January, but operated provisionally under the same trade rules during the transition period.

Brits get small reprieve in Brexit domain crackdown

The .eu registry has given UK-based registrants an extra window to keep hold of their domains, which will soon be deleted due to Brexit.

Brits were originally set to lose their .eu names at the end of the year, due to the expiry of the year-long Brexit transition deal.

But rather than immediately “withdrawing” these domains, EURid will now merely “suspend” them at midnight January 1.

Registrant will then have until midnight April 1 to bring their registration data back into compliance — by transferring them to an entity still based in the EU — to remove the suspension.

Suspended domains will not resolve.

All affected domains will be placed in “withdrawn” status April 1, and then will be deleted and returned to the available pool in batches from January 1, 2022.

Essentially, EURid has given procrastinating Brits a three-month final warning window to avoid losing their names, along with a de facto alert system for those who have not been paying attention.