The launch of the European Community’s .eu domain name happened with a big bang on the 7th of April.
According to the EUID (the over seeing registry) over 1.3 Million domain names have been registered so far with about 700,000 names registered on the opening day of registration. The demand on the system was such that servers login the name applications were regularly off during the first day.

To help with a bit of recall, the introduction of this domain name extension was done in stages. The first 2 stages were reserved for companies, individual and families with special interests such as registered trademarks family names to register their interests and gain control of domain names that are related to them before someone else does. These period lasted from 07/12/2005 till 07/04/2006 and it was broken into 2 equal halves.
During this 4 month period about 300.000 .eu extension domain names were registered. Compared to the number of names registered on the first day of the Land-Rush stage the amount pales in comparison.

According to the data provided by the EUiD, over half of the domain names are far registered to German interest while the UK comes a distant second registering slightly higher than half the number registered by the German.

Dot eu domain name sunrise registration ended yesterday, 6th of April, giving way to the land rush period which started today.
Though .eu is restricted to  the 25 countries in the European Union, its proving to be the most popular new domain extension by far. If you compare .eu sun rise process which attracted over 330,000 applications to  .info sunrise period which attracted only  52,000 names even though .info is open to the whole world you will come to appreciate the popularity of .eu.
As I post this blog, most .eu registrar seem to be have been overwhelmed by demand, I tried my favourite registrar  openSRS and their site seem to be offline.

Eurid has finally began accepting applications for the much awaited Sunrise Phase 1 on the 7th of December 2005. This first phase which will last till the 6th of February is meant only for Public Bodies and Holders of Registered Trademark. This will then be followed by the Sunrise Phase 2 from 7th of February to the 6th of April. This second phase is also reserved for other prior rights holders protected under their national law after which registration is thrown open to all on the basis of “first ask first get” I must commend Eurid for a job well done. The expected bombardment of their servers by registrars jostling to submit their clients’ registration request was easily accommodated by their system. They showed that they have learnt from the past mistakes made by previous registries such as .uk and .de for the United Kingdom and Germany respectively on their first day of trading by ensuring that they allocated more than enough resources to cope with the demands that goes with such a day. Many people have wondered if another top level domain name for Europe is needed when each country within the European Union already has their own, such as .uk for the United Kingdom and .fr for France. However, if there was no point in creating it, I am sure that it would not have gone beyond the deliberation stage of the European Union Parliament nor would it have created the excitement it did beyond that stage. As it is, the extension .eu domains are already being registered, and soon you will start coming across them.