- Offices in Prague and Pisa to follow.
Following the success of new Internet top level domain .eu, EURid - the Brussels based registry for all Internet addresses ending with ".eu" - has opened a regional office in Stockholm, Sweden to support Northern Europe. As a next step, offices are also planned for the Czech Republic and Italy.
The Stockholm office and the future regional offices in Prague and Pisa will assume responsibility for the helpdesk support offered to registrars, domain name holders and the general public in their respective local languages.
By establishing regional offices EURid is able to provide a better service by being closer to the market and the end user.
Since April this year it has been possible for anyone living within the European Union to register a .eu domain name. So far there are about 2.1 million registered domain names, making .eu the seventh largest top level domain in the world.
"We stated already in our proposal to the European Commission that we intended to establish a regional structure. I am now pleased to see that the Stockholm office is in place and that the other offices will follow soon. Stockholm, and Scandinavia in general, is a very IT mature region and ranks high in the number of registered .eu domain names so it was natural to place our Northern region office there, says Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid.
The Stockholm office will be managed by Patrik Lindén who has been with EURid since January. Patrik has previous experience with the Swedish Internet Infrastructure Foundation (IIS), the registry for the national Swedish Internet top level domain .se.
New support staff has been hired and will gradually take over the support for Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Lithuanian. While English will be supported from both locations, for the time being Latvian and Estonian will continue to be supported from the Brussels headquarters. To ensure high quality support the new team will first be trained and will for a while work in tandem with the Brussels' office.
About .eu and EURid - The European Registry of Internet Domain Names .eu was launched in December 2005 with a four month period during which only holders of prior rights, such as trademarks, could apply for their .eu domain name equivalents. This protected period ended in April 2006 when .eu opened to everyone within the EU to register any available name. In less than three months .eu had 2 million registered names and is the seventh largest top level domain in the world.
.eu is operated by EURid, a not-for-profit organisation appointed by the European Commission to register and manage .eu domain names. EURid was founded in April, 2003, with headquarters in Brussels. Regional offices have been established in Stockholm and branches will soon be set up in Pisa and Prague. The founding members, DNS.BE, NIC-SE, IIT CNR, operate the country top-level domains for Belgium (.be), Sweden (.se) and Italy (.it). The registries Arnes, for the Slovenian domain (.si) and CZ NIC, for the Czech domain (.cz) are associated members. See more on the web site www.eurid.eu
For further information, please contact: Patrik Lindén, EURid's Communications Manager and Regional Manager Northern Europe Phone: +32 (0)2 401 27 93 or +46 70 550 71 98 Email: [email protected]
