March 6, 2001

2:13 PM

Following the earlier post regarding cheap domain names, does anyone know anything about .eu.com domains? I've found one site offering them, but are they actually available yet? What's the story?
posted by Cobbler (5 comments total)

It looks like a eu.com or uk.com domain is just a hack, a subdomian of DomainBuster's ownership of those domains.

It'd be like me selling *.metafilter.com domains.
posted by mathowie at 2:24 PM on March 6, 2001

Aunic.net (read: Australian domain gits) do a similar thing selling *.au.com. They bill it as protection against misuse of your good name. I wrote about that (when I was drunk... yes).
posted by holloway at 5:27 PM on March 6, 2001

“It’d be like me selling *.metafilter.com domains.”

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posted by gleemax at 5:31 PM on March 6, 2001

The only way to MeFi.
posted by DoublePostGuy at 6:54 PM on March 6, 2001

You used to be able to get *.usa.com subdomains (see example in link), and they were used by a few offshore companies when they technically couldn't get their own .coms. The domain is owned (today) by mail.com and apparently no longer offers this service.

It could be a cheap way to get a domain name, but you also are somewhat at the mercy of the domain-owner. It's also entirely possible that such domains would have much less legal protection, though I'm aware of no tests.

So on a cost basis, you might as well just go with a cut-rate domain registrar in a recognized TLD. But there could be a place for this in registering a sibling name (e.g. mycompany.eu.com as well as mycompany.eu).
posted by dhartung at 12:47 PM on March 7, 2001