Since 7 December 2005, local authorities and holders of registered trademarks in the European Union can apply for a .eu domain name. And since 7 February, company names can be applied for. This sunrise period, reserved for protected names, ends on 6 April. EURid is the operator of the new .eu domain, while PriceWaterhouseCoopers validates the claims during the sunrise period. From 7 April on, the landrush period begins, when everyone with an address in the EU can request a domain on a first come, first served basis.

According to the status page on the EURid website, more than 300,000 applications have been received for more than 220,000 domain names. Some 35,000 applications have already been approved, and more than 30,000 domains are already up and running on the net, for email or for the web.

Surprisingly, more than half of all the applications come from Germany and the Benelux (Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxemburg), while these countries contain less than one quarter of the EU population.

Here is a pie chart showing the proportion of .eu applications per country. As EURid considers Gibraltar, Réunion, Guadeloupe and Åland as separate territories, I have added their figures to their respective mother countries: the UK, France and Finland.

In the table below, I took the data from the EURid status page, and completed them with population data from the EU countries. I calculated the number of domain requests and approvals per million people, and the approvals/requests ratio per country. Globally, 11% of all applications are approved at this time. But for the Spanish requests this is 22% while only 5% of all Italian requests are approved. We cannot draw conclusions from this discrepancy, since it may be caused by a difference in quality of the applications, or by a difference in processing speed by the PWC staff (all native speakers, it seems) doing the validation.