Taking population size into account shows large irregularities in .eu domain name registrations. Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and the Netherlands have a very high number of registrations compared to their population size, much larger than strong Internet countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.

EURid, the registry managing the .eu TLD (top-level domain) recently suspended 74,000 .eu domain names and sued 400 registrars for breach of contract citing registration abuse using fronts (read EURid’s full statement here). The fronts were located in Cyprus. In light of these recent events, Internet statistics company Ipwalk examined the number of .eu domain names per country relative to their population size to find other possible anomalies.

Malta, Luxembourg, Gibraltar, Cyprus and the Netherlands are at the top when counting .eu domain names per citizen. Malta has almost twice as many .eu domain names per citizen as Luxembourg in second place, more than five times as many as Germany, and almost seven times as many as the United Kingdom.

An unusually large number of .eu domain names per citizen could indicate that other fronts for registration abuse, just like the Cypriot companies mentioned by EURid, operate in these countries.

<img src="http://www.webhostdir.com/images/eu-domains.gif" width="517" height="517">

Ipwalk included gTLD (generic top-level domain) numbers as well, to have a comparison point. Malta has more than four times as many .eu domain names as gTLD names, while Cyprus has twice as many .eu domain names as gTLD names. That is notable, considering .eu domain names have only been available for a short while (though see disclaimer below for other possible reasons for these discrepancies).

The gTLD (.com, .net, .org, .biz and .info) numbers are from Ipwalk. The .eu numbers are from EURid.

Disclaimer: The gTLD numbers from Ipwalk and the .eu numbers from EURid are collected using different methodologies. Ipwalk numbers are based on the location of the nameservers hosting the domain name, while the EURid numbers are per country of registrant. Ipwalk included the gTLD numbers in the report for comparison reasons, but the different methodologies should be kept in mind when analyzing the data.

This report and the diagram showing domain names per citizen, as well as an Excel file with additional data can be found at:
www.ipwalk.com/general/show_news/id/33

About Ipwalk:
Ipwalk is a global information company providing statistics based on a continuously updated database. Ipwalk is processing and analyzing more than 70 million domain names and 50 million IP addresses on a daily basis. This information is provided through the Ipwalk.com website and through customized trend reports. Ipwalk also runs GIGRIB, a community-based, distributed service for monitoring web sites. In addition to this, Ipwalk runs Pingdom, a business-oriented uptime service with notifications. Find out more at www.ipwalk.com.

For more information, please contact:
Peter Alguacil,
Ipwalk AB,
+46-21-124248,
peter@ipwalk.com