Part of the services of the EURid registration authority became unavailable to the public, as the non-profit organisation's servers struggled to handle the onslaught of interested EU citizens. The central WHOIS database, where interested parties can check themselves if a domain is still available and if not, to whom it is registered, was not available any more.
EURid speaker Patrik Lindén, however, assured EurActiv that the more than 1.000 registrars throughout Europe and in other parts of the world could still access the database and continue to serve their customers.
The public opening follows a so-called sunrise period, which started on 7 December 2005 and during which public bodies and holders of geographical indication or trademark rights were allowed to register their websites first. During a second phase, from 7 February 2006 onwards, holders of other rights, such as copyright, could register. Up until 7 April 2006, 343,301 applications had reached EURid, but only 24,676 .eu domain names were activated.
When she presented .eu to the press, Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding stressed that launching the EU's own internet domain also meant that the Union was going to be part of the future of the internet itself, committed to the free distribution and content and opposed to censorship. "I also do not like everything what I see on the Web. But in a free world, we should decide all such cases on the basis of the principle 'in dubio pro libertate' - in case of doubt, in favour of freedom. In a globalising world, this must be Europe's clear and unmistaken contribution to international questions of Internet governance."
The Commissioner announced that all EU institutions will migrate their web page and e-mail addresses from the present .eu.int suffix to .eu before 9 May 2006. The former addresses will however remain available for about a year before they will be switched off. On 7 April 2006, it was not yet time to change bookmarks, though: While some europa.eu webpages forwarded to their europa.eu.int equivalents, others still did not work at all.
