DAVID LINDSAY

The fact that Malta has the highest per capita take-up of the new .eu domain name introduced just four months ago by the EU to the public, has raised suspicions that front companies are registering the domain names in Malta for lucrative resale at later dates.

After EURid, the registry managing the .eu TLD (top-level domain), suspended 74,000 .eu domain names and sued 400 registrars for breach of contract citing registration abuse carried out by front companies located in Cyprus, the watchdog has now said it will be looking into an abnormal amount of .eu domain name registrations in Malta.

With a total of 16,785 .eu domain name registrations, Malta, on a per capita basis, had almost twice as many registrations as Luxembourg, which came in a global in second place, more than five times as many as Germany, and almost seven times as many as the United Kingdom, according to research published by the Internet statistics company Ipwalk.

“We are looking into anything that looks strange. It might just be someone with a lot of domain names but we have a team studying it,” comments EURid spokesperson Patrik Linden. “If a company or individual has purchased a large number of domains, then that’s ok. But if registrars are doing it then it isn’t – that constitutes ‘warehousing’.”

EURid’s action was prompted by what it describes as “abusive behaviour from a syndicate of registrars who have systematically acquired domain names with the obvious intent of selling them. In the domain name business this is called warehousing and is not permitted”.

In its report, Ipwalk states that an unusually high 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 (Malta, Luxembourg, Gibraltar, Cyprus and The Netherlands)”.

For the sake of comparison, Ipwalk included a list of gTLD (generic top-level domain) – which includes the popular domain names .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info – and found that Malta, strangely, has registered over four times more .eu domain names (16,785) than gTLD (3,938) domain names. The numbers account for 42.12 per 1,000 citizens and 9.88 per 1,000 citizens respectively.

Cyprus, which has suffered the brunt of EURid’s legal action, was found to have had only twice as many .eu domain names as gTLD names registered.

The .eu domain name was launched on December 2005 and trademark owners had the rights of first refusal in order to limit potential cybersquatting, while full registrations were opened only in April 2006.