This September marks five years since the delegation of .ευ, an internationalized version of the European Union’s .eu domain, which is operated by EURid. The launch of this Greek-script IDN ccTLD was preceded by serious efforts from ICANN, which had to address concerns from critics who argued that the visual similarity between .ευ and.eu could attract the attention of cyber squatters.
These fears turned out to be unfounded. However, the fears of Greek domain investors seem to have been confirmed. From the start, they warned that the domain would likely not attract any attention at all. Prominent Greek investor and blogger Konstantinos Zournas even called it the “worst extension ever,” adding that the domain doesn’t even serve its intended purpose, since the “Greek abbreviation for European Union is εε, not ευ.
Today, ευ has just 2,561 domains under management, or about 200 fewer than it did a month after its launch in late 2019, Domain Incite reported citing statistics available on EURid’s website. What’s even more disappointing is that a Google search returns results for only two indexed websites with .ευ domain names, while a Bing search returns four websites, two of which are parked web pages – rather unimpressive overall results, given the TLD’s five years of existence.
Fortunately, there are much more successful top-level domains and their internationalized versions. As Russia celebrates Internet Day on September 30, we should mention the Russian ccTLD .ru, which marks its 30th anniversary and currently holds 5.8 million domain names. Next year will mark the 15th anniversary of .рф, the Cyrillic country code top-level domain for Russia, which has nearly 800,000 domain names.
