Blacknight hosting promotes .EU domains to post #bailout Ireland

Talk about a hard sell. The Irish web domain and hosting company, BlickNight Solutions, has launched a campaign to promote the .eu domain to Irish citizens and businesses, less than 6 months after the country accepted a hefty EU/IMF bailout.

In a humourous campaign the company suggests that Ireland “invades Europe” by registering the .eu top-level-domain. The promotion comes on the fifth anniversary of the public release of the domain name.

Credit: Blacknight

Blacknight’s promotion highlights an increasingly important issue with domain registrations; the number of .com domains is running dangerously low.

And as .com domains become more scarce, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organisation responsible for the creation and maintenance of domain names (such as .com, ie, .org) has been active in creating and expanding the number of domain names available.

Most recently the organisation has approved the use of the .xxx domain for pornographic websites and helped in the opening of the formally Columbian-only .co domain, as is used on this site, to global audiences.

ICANN is currently rolling out non-Roman characters in website domains; which allows Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil characters to be used in domain names

The .eu domain name has come under criticism having only been registered 3.4 million times in the past five years, a figure that TechCrunch describes as “a dismal failure.”

Blacknight will be running the series of offers to promote the .eu top-level-doman throughout the months of April and May.  The .eu domain was launched in 2006 and is only available to citizens and companies who are based in one of the 27 European Union member country.