DomainNews reports that eighteen months after launch there are now more than 2.5m .eu domain names registered.

Germany has by far the most registrations with almost 815,000 followed by the UK (354,000), the Netherlands (340,000), France (172,000) and Italy (125,000) being the only countries with more than 100,000 registrations. French Guiana has the least with a grand total of eight registrations!

Dominik Mueller has broken down these registrations by domain length.

Number of .eu registrations, as of December 2006, sorted by domain length:

.eu domain names with only 2 characters: 994
.eu domain names with 3 characters: 28,720
.eu domain names with 4 characters: 77,033
.eu domain names with 5 characters: 102,974
.eu domain names with 6 or more characters: 2, 234,776

dotMobi, the company behind .mobi announced this week that more than 500,000 .mobi domains have been registered in 104 countries since the domain’s commercial launch in October 2006.

The continual growth of .mobi registrations illustrates that content developers are focused on delivering quality sites and applications to mobile phones for consumers to use. Millions of pages of content are now live on .mobi sites and many of the world’s leading brands have gone “.mobi” over past few months.

I was quite enjoying playing around with their mobile phone emulator and mobile ready report as well. I see we still have a lot of work to do on e3internet before we’re ready for mobile visitors. Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by 2008 so worth putting on your TO-DO list.

For more information and to register your .mobi click here.

According to Compulenta.ru, the Russian Registry (Ru-Center) is considering plans to allow .ru domain owners to maintain anonymous registrations, otherwise known as WHOIS privacy. This will allow them to hide their personal details from public access.

According to Andrei Vorobiev, head of the Public Relations at Ru-Center, they planned to maintain public access only to the domain owner’s email. All other confidential information may be classified in the coming months.

This development is most likely associated with the new Russian law on personal data which came into force on 30th January this year. It requires the written consent of all parties for the inclusion of personal data in public facilities.

Doma.in reports that ICANN have unamimously approved the .tel domain and have added the sTLD to the Internet’s root nameservers.

The domain will be adminstered by Telnic, and they are expected to publish a timetable for the rollout of the domain in the coming weeks.

The .Tel domain will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication with emerging technologies like Voice over IP (VoIP). By leveraging innovative DNS (Domain Name System) technology, the .Tel domain will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached.

Domain News reports on a Wall Street Journal article (subscription only) about the success of .mobi domains for small businesses.

One hotelier said he gets 30 to 40 new calls a month from his site http://www.kilburnie.mobi, which is probably a positive return on the investment.

.mobi is one of the most interesting sTLD’s to get released in my opinion. The domains can only be used for sites that have mobile accessibility. The mobile web is a massively growing sector though, as people’s mobile technology improves then they get more used to having web services through that device.

As the article states, big business tends to redirect users on their main TLD (.com etc.) depending on whether the request has come from a mobile phone. There is space now for small businesses to cash in on the interest in the .mobi niche and provide early bird services.

The lack of sites at the moment is most likely due to the lack of understanding in creating mobile sites by the mainstream web design/development industry. Mobile sites use Web Mark-Up Language (WML), which will seem very familiar to anyone working with standard web pages. There are some excellent tutorials for novices on the internet though, I’ve linked to a few of them below.

Mobile Site Tutorials
FreeWebmasterHelp: WML/WAP Tutorial
W3Schools: WAP Intro
WapTutor

If you’re looking to register a .mobi domain, then click here to check availability.

Verisign, the Registry in charge of .com/.net gTLD’s will be raising the prices of these domains on October 15 2007. There will be a 7% increase on .com and a 10% increase on .net domains. We are still waiting for news on how our suppliers will act on the news from Verisign but I would expect prices to change slightly.

We would recommend everyone to renew their domains now to avoid the price increases. Both .com/.net domains can be registered for periods up to 10 years. If you have more than 5 domains in your portfolio with us then contact us and we will arrange a discount for you.

It’s worth noting that registering your domain names for longer periods may improve your websites rankings in Google. As spammers tend to buy and throw away domains, a long registration period is a good indication that your site is trustworthy. In their last patent (August 22, 2006) Google indicated that domain registration age could be a factor contributing to their ‘trustrank’ score for a website.