The European Commission is consulting its 15 national member governments over a draft decision to pick a Belgian-led consortium to run the long-awaited .eu top-level domain name registry

The European Commission is consulting its 15 national member governments over a draft decision to pick a Belgian-led consortium to run the long-awaited .eu top-level domain name registry, a Commission official said Thursday. The front runner is the Brussels-based European Registry of Internet Domains consortium, or EURID, whose Web site is http://eurid.org/About/about.html and which has been set up by DNS Belgium vzw/asbl, Istituto di Informatica e Telematica Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and the Network Information Centre Sweden AB (NIC SE). The final decision is due next month, after the consultation process with the member states is over, said Anne Troye, an official dealing with the .eu domain name. The draft decision, which is at http://www.lextext.com/ENDraftDecision.pdf, awards second place to a consortium called the EU Domain Registry and third place to one called EUREG, according to a leaked copy of the preliminary conclusion. The draft decision gave no details about these runners up. EURID plans to offer a so-called sunrise period for trademark owners to register domains connected to their trademarks and brands to avert cybersquatting problems. It plans to sell domains for Ђ10 (US$10.56) each initially, with the intention that this will fall to Ђ5 after a year.