The ".eu" domain celebrates its 5th birthday. In April, .eu's birthday was celebrated during the European Parliament plenary in the presence of 130 MEPs and the agency running it, EURid, a common endeavour by the ".be", ".it" and ".se", domains from Belgium, Italy and Sweden.

In the beginning there was ".com", then, ".org", ".int" and following the other dots in the web galaxy, ".eu". The European institutions were the first to make the switch, changing their domain registrations from .int to .eu but since then, ".eu" has expanded to cover just about every form of human endeavour. In fact, .eu is fast approaching the 3.5 million registration mark.

The fastest growth has been in Estonia, Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania, where .eu is competing with .com to be the second most popular extension after the national top-level domain. In all, ".eu" is now the fourth most popular domain in the EU and the 9th most popular in the world, in a market led by the ubiquitous ".com". Germany is the main market and with more than a million registrations in five years, .eu has proved more popular for new sites than the national domain name ".de". 

It is interesting to note that the "creative" uses of .eu include some Basque webpages, where it is used to refer to the Basque language, Euskera, and some Romanian, Portuguese and Galician personal websites, as eu in those languages is equivalent to the English pronoun "I".