Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Belgium in rush for .eu domain names


Almost 17,000 applications for a web address with the European domain name .eu have been lodged from Belgium.
Some 320,000 applications in total have been lodged, 5.2 percent of which were made in Belgium, newspaper 'De Tijd' reported on Tuesday.
Almost 1,400 Belgian .eu addresses are already in use and only Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK are performing better.
"The number of applications is high in comparison with the size of Belgium," said a spokesman from EURid, which administers the .eu domain names.
"It can be explained by the popularity of the local .be addresses and by the large number of accredited registration offices in Belgium [70]."
Companies and public authorities have until Thursday to register their name or product name with EURid. Up until then, the owners of a registered brand name are being given priority.
From Friday, anyone can register a .eu website, also with registered brand names. Businesses will then be at risk of being locked into fierce competition to take possession of their domain name.
About 6,500 applications for .eu websites with the names of Belgian companies have been lodged. Examples are colruyt.eu or omegapharma.eu.
The application by brewer InBev is the only one to have been approved so far. The others are still being considered or have been rejected because documentation was lodged too late.

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