It seems like the policy was simply designed to frustrate as many people as possible for no real gain for the EU.
Your surprise exactly reflects the typical beliefs of a Brexit supporter, you thought the idea is you get to keep all the benefits you had before, and also you get rid of any downsides you didn't like, and somehow it's the EU's job to help you achieve this after you leave.
That didn't make any sense in 2016, and it still didn't make any sense in 2020, and so unsurprisingly here we are in 2021 and it isn't what happened. "We told you so" is boring but it's true. We told you so.
.eu domain has certain registration requirements: - A Union citizen, independently of their place of residence. - A natural person who is not a Union citizen and who is a resident of a Member State. - An undertaking that is established in the Union. - An organization that is established in the Union, without prejudice to the application of national law.
Its completely normal for entities to stop servicing other entities after they aren´t in accordance of laws or rules.
It's not surprising at all that people's intuitions about a particular TLD would diverge. But it's sad, because it means the Internet naming system isn't working well in terms of the function of letting users know what particular names mean.
It's not crazy to imagine either a TLD that says "despite any possible appearances to the contrary, this is a first-come-first-served namespace in which names have no extrinsic meaning at all" or a TLD that says "this TLD is owned by entity X, and subdomains, like subdomains of a corporate or governmental network, are only given to persons with an appropriate relationship with entity X, and only during the term of that relationship". (Maybe even a TLD that says "notionally this TLD is about topic or group Y, but our rules about what that means are kind of idiosyncratic".) (But if there are TLDs in all these categories in the same DNS, both registrants and Internet users are probably going to be unsure which is which, as well as exactly what the TLDs in the third group "really" mean.)
It just seems like a case of "we want it to be as painful as possible for you, even if we have to take a bit of additional pain for us too".
Who cares about domain registration revenue? The only reason it isn't free is because of the administrative hassle of distributing frivolous domain registrations.
If EU citizens are confused about UK companies disappearing, maybe they'll search and be exposed to EU competitors, how could that be a bad thing?
Even a bunch of people who by rational assessment would count as British can reasonably say the British fucked them over because of a series of Tory policies, first destroying the paperwork which proves they came here by invitation (on the Empire Windrush and other ships), and then insisting that since they don't have that paperwork if they haven't already secured citizenship papers they were never authorised to be here and must be sent "home" - in some cases forcibly deported to countries they hadn't been to in more than half a century. See "Windrush scandal".
If EU wanted to make more money on it, it would have made it available for everyone from the start. If it doesn't... well, it just means domain-selling is not the core EU-business. So it's exactly one of the 2: either Russian and Japanese companies should be allowed to own *.eu domain, or British ones shouldn't. And I don't honestly care which one is it. But it cannot be both at the same time.
So, no, it's not about hurting you, it's simply about the fact that the world doesn't revolve around you. As surprising as it may sound.
If I somehow owned tax.gov, and was running a tax prep service from it, I doubt the “I’m grandfathered” argument would fly.
It’s likely similar to lawyers.eu (I made that domain up), etc; people should be able to expect that to be an EU based service, not something overseas.
But in the other scenario, they now have to deal with support queries ("why can they have a .eu when I can't?"), possibly legal action ("why can they have a .eu when I can't?"), etc.
...which would have some British businesses grandfathered in and therefore have a loophole that some enterprising lawyer can no doubt make a great deal of hay with.
I think only micronations have a significant revenue coming from tlds (e.g. Tuvalu)
Think of it as a UX reason rather than financial.
1. The .eu TLD is supposed to signify that a business using it is part of the EU. That means EU consumers will know that EU regulations such as GDPR apply, they're unlikely to pay import/export taxes, etc. Allowing non-EU businesses to use it dilutes the purpose and value of the TLD.
2. The EU wants to avoid making freeloading look like a viable strategy. If Britain is able to leave the EU and still reap all the benefits of being an EU member, then what's the point of other nations staying in the EU? Domain names are obviously only a minor benefit of being in the EU but there's a reason this policy is being applied mostly across the board.
There are many ways to skip it, but it blocks at least some.
I guess an EU citizen living in the UK could also hold them on behalf of UK based UK citizens. Thinking about it this situation does seem a little convoluted...
From what I've seen the same is true on the continent. .fr and .de for example are highly popular in France and Germany. You rarely see local business reaching for .eu domains.
According to wikipedia, the number of affected domains is 344,584. Also compared to wiki there are 11M .uk domains and 16.5M .de domains. According to EurID[0] there are 3.7M .eu domains
It's just another $10-20/year and fixes your 'problem'
Many domain registrars will offer this service, as 90+% of their clients will need it for these ccTLD's.
Unfortunately the were asked for some documentation they couldn't provide a few months later and it got shut down.