Brexit brings down shutters on UK-registered .eu domains – and you've got three months to get them back
- Reference: 1609826651
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/01/05/brexit_eu_domains/
- Source link:
On Friday, as Brits awoke from the least celebratory New Year’s Eve of modern times, as many of 81,000 of them discovered that their .eu websites, and related email addresses, had stopped working.
It’s part of a rule change [1]imposed on the company that runs the .eu registry, EURid, by the European Commission after the European Commission decided that ownership of a .eu domain name is reliant on the domain holder’s membership of the European Union.
That approach went against the domain industry’s standard approach, where ownership is not revoked once granted so long as annual registration fees are paid and there is no successful challenge mounted against it, such as a seizure request by the police or a trademark infringement dispute.
Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021 [2]READ MORE
But, worse, as the complexity of the situation became apparent, the rules had to be changed no less than three times as .eu holders threatened to sue. At first, in 2018, the EU [3]decided that any .eu domain registered by a Brit or with a British address would simply be cancelled.
That infuriated many British firms doing business in the EU, Brits living in Europe and EU citizens living in the UK. Eventually, the final iteration of the rules decided that only Brits based in the UK would have their domains taken away, and that rather than being cancelled, they would instead be suspended. Any British .eu domain holder who shifts their domain’s registration address to somewhere in the EU from a UK address will be able to retain the right to own their domain.
Exit stage right
Those rules were finalized in June though the damage was already done. According to EURid’s [4]figures , there were 317,000 .eu domains owned by Brits in 2018; a number that has now fallen to 81,470. In short, most Brits simply dumped the domains. The irony being that the EU itself benefits from, and would have continued to benefit from, the registration of .eu domains: it receives a cut of the annual registration fee.
EURid has been put in the unfortunate position of having to repeatedly email its customers over the past two years to explain the ever-changing rules. And, this week, it put out its “ [5]Third Brexit notice to registrants and registrars ” since December warning UK holders that their domains are going to be taken offline, and with it, their related email addresses.
The domains will be kept in suspension for three months – until March 31, 2021 – and if the owners haven’t changed their physical registered address to one in the EU by then, the domain will then be put on the open market.
“Registration data may be updated by indicating a legally established entity in one of the eligible Union Member States, or by updating their residence to a Union Member State, or proving their citizenship of a Union Member State irrespective of their residence,” reads the advisory.
What now?
It’s not clear, like many other aspects of Brexit, what the impact is: will the owners of .eu domains be confused this week when they return to work to find their website gone and email has stopped working? Or were they using their .eu domain as a secondary site to their main one? Or have they decided to simply let it expire?
The three-month delay was introduced in an effort to prevent EURid from being sued for taking away someone’s property under a policy that goes against industry norms and, frankly, common sense. It’s going to be hard for a .eu domain holder to argue that they weren’t aware of the change if they don’t notice their website has been dead for a few months. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/04/eu_domain_ban/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/04/eu_domain_ban/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2018/03/29/eu_dumps_300000_ukowned_domains_into_brexit_bin/
[4] https://eurid.eu/en/welcome-to-eurid/statistics/
[5] https://eurid.eu/en/news/third-brexit-notice-to-registrants-and-registrars/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
This is normal idiocy
People with an eu domain are more likely to be people who voted remain so the targeting of this "punishment" is completely backwards. All it shows is that no one region has a monopoly on stupid.
Re: This is to punish the UK
Oh do fuck off.
UK voted to leave, EU domains belong to the EU, can’t have cake and eat it.
Don’t start talking about honest politicians while you voted in that pig-headed spiv (with a majority, no less)
Re: This is to punish the UK
Also, from what I remember, the UK originally had some say in these rules.
Re: This is to punish the UK
and .com domains belong to the US so...
Re: and .com domains belong to the US
Hey, El Reg are you listening. Let us return to the .co.uk and give the US back their domain. Unless...
as part of BREXIT you are relocating to the USofA?
Only joking but why did you drop the .co.uk ?
Re: This is to punish the UK
That's just you living up to the cantankerous part of your handle, right?
.com is non-geographic - there is a .us TLD for localised use. It's just that many/most US entities registered as .com / .org etc. that it has assumed some level of de-facto identity as the US domain
Re: This is to punish the UK
A majority of seats, but a minority of votes.
Re: This is to punish the UK
Boris Johnson claims to be eating the cake and having it right now. Pig-faced? I don't disagree. And unaware or not caring that everybody - EVERYBODY - knows he's lying. Apparently he expects us to not care, as well.
Re: This is to punish the UK
Something that Michel Barnier has often said that he is not doing ...
Bullshit! The UK is punishing itself. It decided to leave the EU and it now has to live with the consequences of that decision. One of those conseqences is not being eligible for .eu domain names.
This has been .eu policy ever since the TLD was created. (As a matter of fact lots of TLDs have similar rules: $country's TLD is only for $country's residents.) .eu's policy is not something that's recently been invented. Or a petty attempt to punish anyone.
You seem to be one of the Brexiteers who blame everyone but themselves for their own stupidity. Well, you got what you voted for. Deal with it.
In simple terms the UK chose to leave the club and doesn't get the benefits of club membership any more. One of those benefits was the option to have a .eu domain name.
Re: This has been .eu policy ever since the TLD was created
No it has not. The article specifically states that the policy was changed when Brexit was declared and, if you had been reading El Reg two years ago, you should remember the amount of facepalming that was going on in these forums at the news.
I personally find this move despicable. It has no reason to exist and appears to be purely motivated by spite - which is not something I approve of.
I want a .EU domain...
Fuq.eu, Screw.eu, or maybe even Bilk.eu, just so I can have fun on my business cards. =-)P
Re: I want a .EU domain...
Heh! Yeah and there's me (mistakenly) thinking that eu referred to Europe - a separate thing to the European Union. Which a lot of people don't seem to get!
Re: I want a .EU domain...
What part of "EU" are people not getting? You seem to be puzzled by E but maybe the problem is U.
"European Union citizens, independently of their place of residence or any natural person, company or organisation residing in or established within the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway may register a domain name under .eu (or its variants in other scripts).
"The Terms and Conditions explain who is eligible to register a .eu, .ею or .ευ domain name and the obligations of domain name holders. Additionally, this document describes the terms and conditions under which domain names may be transferred. Together with the Privacy Policy and the WHOIS policy, they provide information on privacy and data protection."
So, EITHER citizens of the EU, OR a person or a company residing in the EU or three friendly independent countries can have a .eu domain name. We in the United Kingdom are not friendly, so we get what we deserve.
How about virtual citizenship?
"or proving their citizenship of a Union Member State irrespective of their residence"
I wonder if one of those Estonian virtual citizenships would count?
While it does seem to fly in the face of established practice...
...I can't remember the last time, outside of trawling (sorry) through Europa.eu for some obscure tract of text, that I actually visited a dotEU URL. The "issue" seems to be a twmpath twrch daear masquerading as a mynydd.
Just having an EU address is not enough
"Any British .eu domain holder who shifts their domain’s registration address to somewhere in the EU from a UK address will be able to retain the right to own their domain"
That's not how we read it. That non-UK address, say in Spain, would need to be associated with a Spanish legal entity and so on. It was easier to get a Spanish national, who is resident in the UK, to become the nominee owner. So we have that person listed and a UK address and so far so good.
I think EURID have got this wrong and are missing a trick - but hey ho.
Re: Just having an EU address is not enough
Even if it's not how you read EURID's statement, that's just what you've done. You shifted the domain's registration to an address somewhere in the EU - this Spanish national of yours.
For businesses operating in the EU, this is unlikely to be the biggest issue that they are facing at the moment!
If you turn over more than 100k€, you have to appoint an agent to act as your importer. Easy enough to transfer the domain to the same agent.
Not my best New Years day.....
This caught us out on Friday (and some of my weekend). We are a global country and have .eu domain for all our EU staff (including UK staff) to access our VPN. So you can imagine the headache this caused, especially right now Fortunately most staff were on leave being new years day.
The fix we did was to update the address with our domain provider to a site in Ireland. It was a little odd as the provider already listed our address as Ireland but apparently the EU has a separate address for each domain that you can't see when you login to manage them. The only way is to log a ticket and ask them to update it for you. Of course the only affected .EU domain was the VPN one.
What concerns me is we had no visibility of the address when managing our domains and no way of knowing this had a UK address. In hindsight I would have expected the domain provider we use to run a check on all .EU domains and their address then advise customers as they're the only one that can see this.
and boo to the EU for just suspending them.
Re: Not my best New Years day.....
"What concerns me is we had no visibility of the address when managing our domains and no way of knowing this had a UK address."
That's utter bollocks! Somebody provided that UK address when the domain name(s) was registered. This should have been recorded in your company's asset register. You also have a duty of care to keep that info up to date. For instance so you get timely notifications from your registrar and the registry about renewal or expiry of those registrations. Those dates should be in your company's asset register too.
It's also unreasonable to expect your registrar - the domain provider? - to check the contact data in their database and in the registry's. That's *your* responsibility. Nobody else is going to know the internal structure of your business. Or be sure which parts of the contact info - that you provided - correctly reaches the people in your organisation who look after your domain name registrations, pay bills, etc. How could any registry or registrar possibly know if you did or didn't want to link a UK address to some domain name?
Re: Not my best New Years day.....
That's utter bollocks! Somebody provided that UK address when the domain name(s) was registered. This should have been recorded in your company's asset register.
In the highly elequont terms that you have yourself employed I think that most people are bound to point out that this is also "utter bollocks"
In elucidation one could point out that if the threatened action is undertaken this would be the first instance of a professional registry going through the registry database deleting the domains of anybody with an address registered in a particular geographical area.
Hitertoo the process where somewhere has ceased to be acceptable for new registrations has been to deny new registrations, but allow existing registrations to continue until the registrant doesn't want it anymore.
Therefore, to this point there is zero reason for anybody to have recorded the physical address used in the contact data in their asset database. The precedent of the EU having a temper tantrum and throwing it's toys out of the pram while screaming like a toddler is unlikely to have much of an effect elseware, because the reason nobody else has done it is because upon the simplest consideration it's obviously idiotic.
To save such consideration, the reason it's idiotic is because the UK is unlikely to be the last country to leave the EU. You'd now be insane to consider basing your entire market presence around a .eu domain as it's an established fact that even if you are a committed lover of the EU that you could arbitarily suffer the loss of your domain name, and if you've done millions of quid worth of advertising around that domain (which over a couple of decades is easily possible for even a SME) that's potentially going to be fatal to your company.
Hence, even the strongest advocate of the EU is unlikely to want to bet their livelyhood on the EU not having more temper tantrums in the future, which makes a .com or .biz, or frankly any other domain name rather less of a multi million quid/euro gamble.
Any thinking person will only ever consider a .eu domain to be something you have to prevent squatting, or if they are going to register one then as a safeguard it'll be registered through a shell company that specialises in preventing the registrar from knowing whom the actual owner of the domain is, which utterly defeats the purpose of having any contact details in the database to start with.
I had already transitioned away from my .eu to a .uk domain when this was first reported in 2018, so it’s no biggie my .eu domain has now been revoked.
However due to moving it between providers and paying for years in advance, it wasn’t due to expire until 2027.
Both eurID and my registrar are keeping quiet when I ask them to refund the registry fees for a service they’ve taken away and I won’t be able to use what I’ve paid for.
Oh - you should complain - take it to the European Courts? Still it's hardly likely to be your biggest cost due to Brexit......
Is it the EU Court of Justice that has jurisprudence?
If the service was purchased in the UK it may well be a matter for the UK courts. Simply stating that EU or USA or any other law covers the contract does not allow the provider to arbitrarily stop providing the service because they want to throw their toys out of the pram.
I am not aware of who has authority here but would not be too sure it was EU law anymore. Worms - can - can - worms.
Legal squibling and trebles all round!
I won’t be able to use what I’ve paid for
Yeah.... you, me and everybody else. For a great many things.
If you rage quit your local tiddlywinks club because you want the right to make your own rules up, you don't get to still play with the tiddlywinks they bought when you were a member.
@Kieren
Good article. This situation has been a farce but up to the usual standards of politicians.
This is to punish the UK
Something that Michel Barnier has often said that he is not doing ... things like this make it plain that he is as honest as any other politician.