Internet : the European Commission proposes a '.eu'

A progress in the creation of a new geographic extension that would indicate the European Union membership and would tend to compete with the 'dot com' that cannot be ignored.

This is a decision that will please the /www.7ways.com">7ways.company. The start-up from Sophia Antipolis, managed by Eric Lantonnet, which has been launched out in the creation of domain names under the TLDnames brand for one year, was struggling very hard in favour of the creation of a '.eu'. Since the beginning of the week, the European Commission was particularly in favour of the creation of this new 'geographic' extension, which, as national suffixes such as .fr, .it, .uk, and others, would indicate the European Union membership.So a month after the creation of seven new extensions by the ICANN, the organization that regulates the domain names on the Web (see the article Field names : the seven new extensions), the European Commission proposes a '.eu' aimed towards the European Union companies. Besides, the creation of this new extension, which would allow to compete with the dot com that cannot be ignored for the moment, has already been tackled during the first batch of extensions. But, at that time, it did not have been accepted.Erkji Liikanen, the European commissioner in charge of information matters, pointed out in an interview that ' national extension codes as '.fr' for France will keep on existing. The first level domain '.eu' would be a supplementary possibility for companies.'Now the Commission has to asked both Council and Parliament to give a ruling on this proposal in order for it to be presented to the world more officially.La Tribunein an article of December 13th 2000 adds that ' in a second step, the European Commission also intends to insert second level domain names such as '.press.eu', '.media.eu', etc. The Commission, which could use '.union.eu', would be put in charge of working out requisite government policies for the operation of this new extension.'After the Summit in Nice on institutions of a larger Europe, a big step forward towards a Net Europe which would take a little bit more its web destinies in hand…