Celebrating 10 years of European online identity with .eu - Main contents
Today marks the 10th anniversary of .eu, the country code top-level internet domain for the European Union.
Registrations have grown steadily over the last decade to reach almost 4 million as of the end of last year, making .eu the 11th largest top-level domain in the world.
And it continues to grow, because at the start of June .eu will launch in Cyrillic: an important milestone for non-Latin scripts, further helping online multilingualism in Europe.
I am pleased to see that more and more users are choosing the .eu domain, which connects more than 500 million people to one internet identity, across the 28 countries of the European Union as well as in Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
A .eu website gives confidence and security to whoever is using it.
The name extension tells people that they are dealing with a legal entity which is subject to European trading and consumer laws. It sends a clear message that a company is European and open to business beyond its national borders.
This encourages and attracts potential customers from all over the world, not just from the company's country of origin. In addition, as a company extends its activities in one European country to another, there is no need for it to set up new national websites. By using a .eu extension, it already has all of Europe covered.
This is good news for businesses - especially medium- and smaller-size ones - which want to expand across borders and meet the needs of users in other countries.
In a world that is becoming more digital and globalised, few businesses can afford to limit their operations or their customers to a single country.
Today, with more and more business being done online, the digital economy is expanding a great deal faster than traditional sectors.
We want to encourage Europe's people and businesses to take full advantage of the digital age.
It is precisely what the Digital Single Market (DSM) is all about: breaking down digital barriers between EU countries, encouraging intra-European as well as extra-European trade in goods and services, and reinforcing trust in the online world.
The .eu domain helps us to meet all these challenges and is also helping us to build the DSM. It increases confidence in e-commerce in the EU; the sheer number of .eu domain names being registered and used today demonstrates that people see it as a trusted extension.
Another reason for the domain's success is its recognised level of safety, since it offers what is known as Domain Name System Security Extensions, or DNSSEC: a security protocol that helps to reduce the chance that visitors to an .eu website are led to fake websites if they type its (DNSSEC-protected) address into their browser.
As the DSM grows and develops, along with the expected rise in cross-border e-commerce, I am confident that the .eu domain will maintain its strong position in the market as a stable, trustworthy and secure extension.
With the support of .eu registry EURid, Europeans will continue to enjoy a common online identity that can be appreciated and relied upon by people and businesses, hopefully for many more decades to come - in our continent, and beyond.
Another blog soon.
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