It’s not determined yet, but it could be bad.
A DNW podcast listener emailed a question to me this week that I hadn’t considered before:
Will UK residents still be able to register and own .EU domain names after Brexit is complete?
Great question. It turns out EURid, the registry for .EU, has already answered this question…sort of:
On 23 June 2016 voters in the UK referendum expressed their preference to leave the European Union. As the next steps have still not been determined and the political and legal processes have not yet been initiated, note that no action will be taken against .eu or .ею domain names that have been registered by residents in UK.
EURid has been appointed by the European Commission to manage the technical infrastructure of .eu and its variants in other scripts. When further details are known about the timing and details of a UK exit, the European Commission will instruct EURid on how to proceed. We will continue to keep all our stakeholders fully informed.
In other words, there’s a possibility that UK residents will be left out of .EU in the future but this hasn’t been determined.
eco published a paper to address the challenges of BREXIT for the Domain Industry. You can download it here: https://numbers.eco.de/downloads.html
Good stuff, thanks
Even if they could, why would they?
Being out of the EU, it doesn’t make sense using an .eu domain name.
They might have registered them as an investment.
The UK still is an EU member. With hundreds of thousands .eu domain names registered by UK registrants. There needs to be a solution for these domain names.
The message appeared on the EURid website the day after the UK Brexit vote. I have .eu domain interests and wanted to check what effect Brexit may have. On further investigation, eligibility for .eu domain registration is residence in EU & EEA countries. Switzerland is in neither and has NO rights to use the .eu domain, so I suspect if we also pull out of EEA as assumed, we’ll probably keep the domains until registration expires, at which point they’ll be terminated. Assuming common sense and sanity prevails, I very much doubt they’ll be terminated immediately upon UK exit.