On May 22nd 2003 the Commission announced that it has chosen the EURid consortium to run the .EU TLD.
EURid is a not for profit organisation that is built around the Belgian, Italian and Swedish registries.

This decision is the latest step in the process of creating a new European Top Level Domain extension. EURid responded to the Call for Expression of Interest that was launched by the European Commission in August last year. A panel of independent experts then evaluated the bids and indicated EURid as the best choice to run the .EU registry.

In the coming weeks, negotiations will take place between the European Commission and EURid to finalise the agreement and to establish the public policy for the .eu registry. Once the administrative part is finalised, including the delegation from ICANN, EURid estimates that .EU can go life within the next 6 months.

It is clear that a lot of issues still need to be resolved and that some will depend on the definition of the public policy and on further negotiations with the European Commission.

As soon as the new registry is formed and more details about the registration processes are coming up, we will inform you how you can pre-register .EU domain names.

emerion will be one of the first registars offering real pre-registrations based on the registry-level.