The European Union has approved the .eu Internet domain, with chosen administrator EURid signing a deal with European Commission Information Society director general Fabio Colasanti this week.
From there, EURid will ask the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to add .eu to the Internet's root domain name system servers, expecting it could begin registrations between six and nine months from now, according to several reports.
The group hopes for swift conclusions to talks with ICANN, after which there would be a four-month period in which trademark holders could reserve their .eu domains.
.eu has been a topic since 1998 but needed the EC to adopt regulations, the European Parliament to adopt legislation, an operator to be found, and policies created, before it could go from idea to implementation. The most recent delay, according to EUObserver, was a dispute between EU member states as to the public policy issues regarding the domain, which kept it from going live in 2003.
ICANN is said to have the policy framework ready to let it approve .eu on the country-code top-level, even if the EU technically is not a nation. EURid is a joint project between country-code top-level domain operators in Belgium (DNS Belgium), Italy (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica), and Sweden (Network Information Centre), with companies from Slovenia and the Czech Republic also said to be part of the project.
