Dot.eu

In 1999 the European Council began discussing a single top-level domain for Europe. After several years of consideration, the European Commission appointed EURid as the operator of the .eu registry in 2003 and the general registration for the domain began in April 2006. Five years after its establishment, “dot.eu” internet domain name has more than 3.4 million registrations and has become the 9^th biggest top-level domain on the Internet and ranks in 4^th place in Europe.

This is an EU policy in action that has particularly benefited small and medium enterprises, which top the registrations. It can add value to rural businesses as it raises their profile on European markets by providing them with a pan-European identity on the internet. An “.eu” web presence is instantly recognized by customers who may otherwise be suspicious of a country domain name they do not recognize. A study of the brand strength of the “.eu” done in 2009-2010 found that “.com” had the strongest brand, but among the recent domain names .eu was most recognized (70%).

An additional benefit for rural businesses across Europe is that “.eu” in any of the 23 official languages of the EU and so does not require good knowledge of English for registration and for managing problems. It also allows the use of special letters such as "é", "ö", "ç" or "č" as well as non-Latin scripts such as the Cyrillic "ю", "ф", "ж", "й" or the Greek "ε", "ω", "μ", "φ" to the left of the ".eu" web-address, which is especially good news for Bulgaria.

The domain is most popular in Germany, where it has more than 1 million registrations, followed by the Netherlands with almost half a million, UK and France. In Bulgaria there are only 20,000 .eu registrations. However, in 2010 the increase in .eu registrations was driven by dramatic growth in Bulgaria (43%) and Estonia (39%).