On January 3, domain names previously owned by UK registrants in the European Union’s unified ccTLD became available for re-registration. UK citizens no longer qualified for .EU when the country’s exit from the EU (known as Brexit) officially came into effect at the end of 2020. The EURid registry, which manages the .EU domain, repeatedly notified UK registrants and offered them long extensions to correct the situation. Registrants could transfer them to an entity in the EU, or to an EU citizen residing in the UK.
A year seemed quite enough time for this, and yet many Brits never got around to it. As a result, about 48,000 former British domain names in the .EU zone became ownerless. EU registrants got the opportunity to re-register these names starting January 3, 2022. According to Domain Incite, quoting a representative of EURid, around 6,000 domain names were re-registered on the first day, or just over 13 percent of the total number of domains lost by UK registrants. There were about 300,000 .EU domains registered by UK citizens and entities at the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016.
