While the Brexit situation remains at best “unclear” the future of UK based .eu domain name registrants has finally received a little bit of clarity.
It might not be the best of news, but it’s relatively clear. Of course in common with anything that is linked in anyway with Brexit and what form it might take, the entire thing is still “up in the air”.
EURid have published the full details here.
In very simple terms if you are a .eu registrant then you need to make sure that you fit the registration rules in a post-Brexit world through one of two ways:
- Your domain is linked to an address in the EU or EEA, which is essentially how all .eu domains have been handled up until now
- The registrant is an EU citizen regardless of where they might be located. This stems from the updated registration policies that will be coming into force next month.
If in the run up to the October 31st Brexit deadline your domain(s) are still linked to a UK address you will start getting warning emails from both EURid and your registrar (assuming your registrar hasn’t flagged the issue with you already!).
If you do not update your domain registrations by January 1st 2020 then you will lose access to them as they’ll be moved into a form of “DNS limbo”. They’ll still “exist”, but no services associated with them will work and there does not seem to be any path towards reactivating them or bringing them into compliance in order to get them working.
The fact that practically everyone on the planet will be on holiday on January 1st when these domains get pulled doesn’t seem to be an issue for the powers that be, so I suspect that the volume of customer service issues this will create will be impressive – and for all the wrong reasons!
From November 1st 2020, which will be the anniversary of Brexit, any of the .eu domain names that were put into the “limbo” I mentioned will be completely deleted and become available for registration.
The implications of how .eu will handle UK based registrations are very broad and could have open up some very awkward issues in relation to cybersecurity, phishing, trademark infringement and a whole lot more, apart from undermining confidence in the .eu namespace. Bear in mind, of course, that this entire thing is being mandated by the European Commission who run the .eu domain name. EURid are, unfortunately, just following orders.
