Eu domain names were launched in December 2005 as a country code top level domain for European union which was made available to the citizens and organizations of the EU member states. This Top Level Domain is taken care by EURid, an organization comprising of national registry operators from many European Union states. Full-fledged registration process started in April 2006.
The early phase of operation was termed as the sunrise period. This was further broken into 2 phases. The first phase began in December 2005, which was to check and allot domain names to registrants with existing rights based on geographic names and trademarks. The second phase was carried out from February 2006 which covered personal names, trade and company registrations.
In April 2006, registrations became possible for people without trademarks. Most people who were requesting domain names had already asked their registrars to have their requested domains pre-registered by putting them in a queue, not to miss a chance to register a domain. More than 700k domain names were registered even before first few hours of operation. Large registrars like Dotster and Go Daddy began to suffer from unresponsiveness and long queues of operation, allowing people to register through a person who has already bought a domain. Till August 2006, approximately 2 Million domain names had been registered. Now, .eu is the forth largest registered domain in Europe and holds the ninth position internationally. This process of grabbing domains by registrars was commonly known as the land rush process.
Many companies and individuals criticized this land rush process. They said that such a process created hundreds of phantom registrars, creating an unhealthy way of doing business. These “phantom” registrars had many opportunities and ways of registering a domain whereas genuine registrars had only one opportunity to register the same domain.
These domain names had also been brought to use by many European Union institutions by registering the second-level domain .europa.eu. Institutions and agencies made a switch from previous .eu.int to .europa.eu domain names in May 2006. However, the European Central Bank still uses the domain ECB.eu, unaffected by the shift.
.eu has its main users as websites with European or cross-border audiences and traffic, as known in the technical terms. .eu is more commonly used to emphasize that the website has a European Identity, as opposed to a website which has a strictly national country top-level domain or a global .com nature.
In most countries of European Union, national top-level domains have a major share in the market. The remaining share is spread over .com/.net/.org/.info/.biz in sequential order. Due to this, this young extension has had to work a lot to gain a significant share of these national markets.
