Friday 8 April 2011

EU enthusiasm in an unexpected place - Gibraltar

EURid (crazy name, crazy guys...) has been kind enough to publish stats for registrations to date of the .eu top level domain by country / territory, and Germany emerges a clear leader based on raw volume - 1,041,614 so far.  Bottom of the heap is French Guiana at 59, although it is possible that there are other special cases where no registrations have been made - St Pierre & Miquelon for example.  We've managed just shy of a third of a million.

Anyway, so far so not very interesting.  I have had a go at charting .eu registrations relative to population, and it is Gibraltar which emerges as by far the most enthusiastic, with 3,370 registrations for a population of 31,000.  This, I would imagine is down to UK entities with a Gib presence preferring .eu to .gi, thinking it less likely to scare the horses.  Of the EU 27, Cyprus leads from Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

(click chart for legible version).

At the other end of the scale, of the sovereign states it is the Spanish, Portuguese and the Romanians who have the lowest level of registrations per capita.  However, it is France's Dom-Toms - the recipients of quite phenomenal levels of EU largesse - that are the least enthused.  Still more hopeless stattos can find figures for net donors and recipients per capita here.

6 comments:

  1. The Gibraltarians eem quite enthusiastic about the EU anyway, and seem not to have that much time for British nationalist Daily Mail style politics.

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  2. Gibraltar's off its collective brain then. It's not in their interests in the least, especially not to keep the detested Spain at bay.

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  3. As your resident Gibraltar Correspondent, I can't resist biting on this one!

    The truth is that the extension is hideously overpriced at £50pa and very parochial. If you trade outside of Gib it is meaningless, so it only gets used by the local window-cleaning firms and restaurants.

    My place Allseeingeye.gi for example exists but only as a simple redirect to the .net version. My local readers all seem to have bookmarked the local domain because they like that sort of thing - everyone else goes straight to the internationally recognised one.

    You can't shift a .gi to another registrar as you can with a 'big' domain so it's easy to be conned into taking expensive local hosting too - and then we'll empty your wallet faster than you can say macaque attack.

    Many offices in Gib have a very 'offshore' feel with small rooms containing thousands of brass-plate companies from around the world. None of those companies want .gi domains because their only local presence is an overworked book-keeper. So .eu is the logical choice.

    So, James, that's why the stats get horribly skewed rather than us being collectively demented :-)

    Paul, the local relationship with the EU is very nuanced and whilst I would disagree with your comment I understand why it might seem that way.

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  4. Gents - thanks to all for the input, but especially to Geoff for the local insight - £50 p/a for a TLD is appalling

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  5. gave up the ghost9 April 2011 at 14:25

    Good luck with the new blog C. But you'll always be C to me.

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