.eu is dead, could not agree more
It is not dead. It just went from a drunken, back of an envelope idea to zombie TLD bypassing the functional ccTLD aspect.
There is a lot of brand protection registration and that is supporting some of the .eu registration volume. The massive speculative element killed it for European countries and it is regarded as another sick Brussels joke in the English speaking parts of the EU. The .uk ccTLD is around 8.48 Million domains. Eurid (the .eu registry) claims that the number of UK owned .eu domains is around 330K. However most of these are owned by US/Canadian front companies registered in the UK. In real terms, the UK's .eu footprint would be around 60K at a guess. The German .eu registrations are what keeps .eu afloat. But even with Germany, the .de is around 13.5M domains. The .eu, when you break it down over the countries of the EU represents between 5 and 18% of each country's ccTLD/com/net/org/biz/info/mobi footprint. When Eurid added IDNs last December, it gave the .eu a minor boost but it was very much a dead cat bounce. The only regions of the EU where it seems to be growing is in the Eastern countries (Poland/Czech Republic/Slovakia/Slovenia etc). In the older EU countries (where the ccTLDs are the primary TLDs), it is not doing well.
The reason that Rick Latona's .eu auction failed was simply because the quality of the domain names was absolutely dire. They were, for the most part, simple copies of what were selling from mid to high value in .com over 2005-2008. Some were Americanisms that are just not used in Europe. I think that most of the .eu domains at auction were not so much junk as .com bubble domains that got lost. The mistake that a lot of non-EU domainers make is in treating the EU as a single market. The reality is that it is not and English is not the only language in the EU. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union ) In Ireland, the term to describe .eu is quite precise: banjaxed.
Regards...jmcc