The .EU Landrush fiasco. New facts emerge. It's worse than we thought!

The .EU Landrush is riddled with problems.
In my prior blog article I described the fiasco and gaming that has taken place with the .EU Landrush. All of it stems from the lax way the EURid registry administered the registrar accreditation process.

It's difficult to fathom the full extent of the problems.
Since that writing, I have completed additional analysis of the accredited .EU registrars listed on the EURid website. I wish I could say that this analysis embraced all of the registrars that have been accredited to take .EU registrations. This is not possible because of an unbelievable option provided to registrars by the EURid registry.

EURid allows registrars to "opt out!"
The EURid registry allows its accredited registrars to "opt out" of being listed on the EURid website. All a registrar would need to do is to click a box and their name would not appear on the EURid website -- of course legitimate registrars would never do this. I did not mention this fact yesterday, as I was not finished with my analysis. I did not want to make phantom registrars aware that this option was available and see them vanish before my work was done. I believe had they known this option was available, many phantoms would have "opted out" initially. As it stands, it is difficult to know how many phantom registrars were savvy enough to have "opted out" of the accredited .EU registrar list.

EURid will not release the .EU "zone file."
Most registries publish what is called a "zone file" and make it available to their accredited registrars. By using the "zone file" it's possible to see which registrars have registered which names. The EURid registry has elected thus far not to release its zone file.

There are more phantoms than I estimated earlier - many more.
In my prior article I estimated that there were at least 600 phantom registrars. I'm now revising that number to more than 700 - and this is just the amount I can glean from those listed on the EURid website. Assuming that many were clever enough to "opt out" of being listed on the website, the number of phantom registrars could actually be well over 1,000.

The New York phantoms -- not a soccer team.
A huge group of 400 registrars, all located in New York, caught my eye in particular. None of these registrars have a website - imagine that, a registrar without a website. All of these registrars were registered as Delaware LLC's and listed the Corporation Service Company as their agent - so they are all, no doubt, related and part of the same group.

This EURid registry rule had to have been broken.
One of the requirements to which every registrar agreed, as part of their accreditation, is that it would only submit name requests to the EURid registry that it has actually taken from the registrant. This of course would be very difficult for a registrar without a website to do. It's fairly obvious that the conditions of the EURid registration agreement have been violated.

Europeans are the biggest losers.
As a result of the widespread abuse of the Landrush process, the EURid registry has, for the most part, been pushed aside by well-funded and savvy professionals. The big losers here are those seeking .EU domain names, particularly the really good names that are available initially. Many of these names have been gamed away by the various groups that created all those phantom registrars. The end result is that Europeans didn't benefit at all from the Landrush - they will, by and large, pay absolute top dollar for the .EU names they want. The opportunists, on the other hand, will make a fortune.

Now let's see who will step up.
As I mentioned in my prior blog article, it's going to be interesting to see if ANYONE at the EURid registry or ANY of the European regulatory agencies are going to step up and investigate this very unsavory affair. Here's my bet: Nothing will be done -- I hope I'm proven wrong.