The sunrise period for “short” IE domain names drew to a close before Christmas.
While there wasn’t a huge number of domains registered during the sunrise by brand owners, there were several well known companies that succeeded in getting one or more domains.
If you check the whois records for many of the domains you’ll find that they are registered to well known brands’ holding companies or other corporate entities. This is due in part to the trademark restrictions imposed during the landrush phase, as the only way to get a domain was to use a registered trademark that was an exact match to the domain desired.
Here’s the list, with their respective registrants and current status:
- 3.ie – Three Ireland. The domain seems to be pointing to one of their servers, but currently gives an error
- aa.ie – AA Ireland – they’re currently redirecting it to their existing site
- bp.ie – BP PLC – not resolving
- bt.ie – BT aka British Telecommunications Plc – redirecting to their main Irish site
- cl.ie – Craigslist Inc – generic holding page
- cp.ie – ATLAS COPCO AKTIEBOLAG – currently goes to a blank page instead of the company’s Irish site
- ea.ie – Electronic Arts – redirects to their main .com
- ef.ie – Signum International S.a.r.l. Luxembourg, Luzern Branch – blank page
- ey.ie – Ernst & Young – redirects to their Irish site
- f.ie – Facebook – not resolving
- fb.ie – Facebook – not resolving
- hm.ie – H&M Hennes & Mauritz AB – not resolving
- hp.ie – HP – currently it’s returning an error, though the error page is being served from part of the main hp.com domain.
- ig.ie – IG Group – not resolving
- jd.ie – BEIJING JINGDONG 360 DU E-COMMERCE LTD. – pointing to their 2 letter .com
- m.ie – Merck KGaA – broken redirect
- pp.ie – Paypal Inc – does not resolve
- qb.ie – Intuit Inc – pointing to their main site
- r.ie – Roadstone Ltd – redirects to their main site
- rb.ie – Reckitt Benckiser S.ar.l – redirects to their main site
- t.ie – DEUTSCHE TELEKOM AG – not resolving
- te.ie – Eircom Limited – not resolving (interestingly te.ie was registered via a 3rd party registrar, yet r.ie was handled by Eircom who are a registrar)
- wu.ie – Western Union Holdings Inc. – pointing to their main site
- zf.ie – ZF Friedrichshafen AG – not resolving
Looking over that list it’s dominated by international brands and companies. This is probably due to the trademark restrictions, as there aren’t that many trademarks which would be an exact match to 1 letter, 2 letters or 1 digit to begin with.
IEDR also restricted a small number of domains from being registered, but all the other digits and single and double letter combinations are still available for registration during “landrush”.
