EURid, which manages the country code top-level domain for the European Union, has published its third-quarter update. The total number of .eu registrations, including IDNs in Cyrillic and Greek scripts, .ею and .ευ, reached 3,670,426 after 157,962 new domains names were added to the registry, which is consistent with a 7.75% year-on-year increase. The top five countries with the most .eu/.ею/.ευ registrations are Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Poland. Curiously, in the third quarter, the number of .eu registrations dipped in all these countries. However, the decline was insignificant, no more than 1% in any of them. Of the top ten, Spain (+5.9%) and Belgium (+4.3%) had the highest annual growth in registrations during the past quarter.
The average renewal rate for .eu registrations remained consistently high as well at 83%, flat on the previous period. The internationalized versions of .eu showed modest growth, however, with only 714 new registrations.
In addition to the registry’s core operations, the report also focuses on its efforts to bolster security. In May 2024, EURid launched a system that automates the identity verification process for domain name holders, EURidity. In the third quarter, 33,987 .eu domain names were flagged as potentially suspicious, almost twice as much as in the same period last year (18,763). The report, however, emphasizes that this was not a consequence of mounting illegal activity in the domain zone; the change was due to enhanced measures to identify and suppress such activity.
