Wednesday 26 September 2007

An email to my Euro MPs about .eu domains

I followed the proposal over the years, and the eventual set up, of the .eu domain and was hoping to acquire clifford.eu. Unfortunately, this was acquired by a company called Direct Electronics inc, which appears to be a UK subsiduary of an American company.

I did feel it was wrong that a company could buy the name during the "sunrise" period rather than it being made to take its chance with individuals like me. But, OK, that was the rule, even if I think it was a bad rule. But I really object to the fact that clifford.eu is not actually being used. I guess that it was bought precisely for that purpose - to stop it being used. (This is verifiable because there is no DNS for the domain). So an American company has bought a .eu domain, is not using it, and is preventing a EU citizen, me, from using it!

All of the above does not break any .eu rules but what was the point of setting up the .eu domain just for companies to buy .eu domains and not use them? It would be interesting to find out what proportion of .eu names are being abused in this manner and how much tax payers' money has been wasted on setting up the .eu infrastructure just so companies can stop the .eu names from being used.

An alternative domain name would have been ahc.eu, ahc being my initials. http://ahc.eu is a website offering the domain name for sale. Again, this is not against the rules but, again, seems to have made the setting up of the .eu domain a pointless waste of time. I wonder how many .eu domain names come into this category?

Being a keen photographer, a domain like f8.eu would have been perfect for my website of photographs. So what is occupying this domain name at the moment? It's a page of click-through advertisements and again, the name is offered for sale. No rules broken but a pointless waste of time to have set up the .eu domain for click-through advertisement pages. I wonder how many .eu domains come into this category. How much tax money was used to set up all of this pointless infrastructure?

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