The .EU domain is gaining momentum.

On March 4, the registrar of the European Union domain EU presented a report for the fourth quarter of 2010, according to which the growth of registrations in the .EU zone in 2010 was 6% compared to 5% in 2009.

Today, the EU domain is among the ten largest top-level domains in the world, with 3.3 million registrations. This growth in domain popularity has resulted in increased domain activity in Bulgaria (43%), Estonia (39%), Poland (14%), and Italy (14%).

Germany leads the world in .EU domain registrations, with nearly 1 million registered domains. The top ten countries with the largest number of .EU domain registrations accounted for 86% of all EU registrations in 2010. These countries included the Czech Republic (23%), Italy (14%), Poland (14%), and Spain (11%). In the UK, growth was negative (-0.4%), but rose to 2% in the fourth quarter.

Active growth in the fourth quarter of 2010 was observed in 26 of the 27 EU countries, with Bulgaria (25%), Romania (14%), and Estonia (10%) particularly notable. The re-registration rate remained unchanged at 77%.

Let us recall that the main events in the EU zone in 2010 were:

• introduction of DNSSEC in the zone (June-September 2010);

• Germany surpasses the 1 million mark for .EU domain registrations (September);

• the first anniversary of the start of registration of multilingual domains in the .EU zone (December).