Yesterday we have received 492 emails from Eurid. As copied below:


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Dear Domain name holder,


Since your company was dissolved at 18/09/2007 and therefore does not fulfill general eligibility criteria all the domain names concerned have been revoked according to the provisions of the regulation 874/2004.


Kind Regards

The EURid Team

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We were not given any notice.

According to the article mentioned rgulation 874/2004 that can be reached at the address

http://www.eurid.eu/images/Documents/EC_874_2004/ec%20regulation%20874_en.pdf

Article 20

This procedure shall include a notice to the domain name holder and shall afford him an opportunity to take appropriate measures.


No notice has been given.

This has put us as a registrar in very difficult situation.

This is not the first time Eurid has done this.

I would like to warn the other registrar and registrants with this so that they can expect such things can happen with EU domain names.

We are trying to dispute the decision and we will update the ticket with the latest progress.

Think twice when you choose the extension you run business with. We have not encountered such problems with any other registry we are registrar of.

Best of luck. Keep us informed.

What happened to the company that could register .eu domains?
If it is dissolved how do you expect to keep the domains?

Similar things have happened with .uk domains (though not without notice AFAIK).

Scenarios that I know of have included...

- IT contractor (dealing as one-man-band limited company) has registered his personal domain name in the name of his company. He goes back into permanent employment, forgets that his mysurname.co.uk domain is registered to his company's name, his company gets dissolved... he loses his domain name.

- Web designer has registered domain name to his own company instead of his client. Web designer ceases trading and dissolves his company... client loses domain name

I understand that Nominet has exercised some discretion in some of these cases. As long as there is another person or legal entity with a legitimate claim to the domain then Eurid ought to do the same.

It appears you are in Canada. Had you set up a 'dummy' European company to meet eligibility rules & register the .eu names?

Go to: http://list.eurid.eu/public/registrars/SearchForm.htm

Type in a letter (ie an s) into the registrar line.

You will see a short list of "Subscribers to the Code of Conduct" and a much longer list of "Registrars who did not subscribe to the Code of Conduct:".

When I posted my earlier response I had not fully considered the implications of the OP's location (or the LARGE number of domains that had been revoked).

This is, of course, NOT the type of scenario where Nominet has occasionally been known to exercise discretion over .uk domains.

It appears to be a case of someone setting up a European company to qualify for .eu domains (nothing wrong with that!) and then dissolving that company because "it has served its purpose" - which, with all due respect, would have been a bit of a foolish thing to do!

If the company had not been dissolved then all would have been well.

A company that doesn't exist can't own domains - it's as simple as that.