Any webmaster interested in .eu domains, read on.
I pre-registered the .eu variants of all our sites through Godaddy in November, followed up with a call to make sure everything was done properly and they were going to take care of business. This is not a straight-forward process - you have to have a company registered in Europe, you have to be able to claim some sort of prior right, and you have to submit evidence of these prior rights. The registrar is supposed to submit your applications to eurid.eu, then Price-Waterhouse has to receive the documentary evidence (through a process that was not at all clear to me, Godaddy assured me PWC would be in touch).
Right before Christmas, and then after AVN, I called Godaddy to verify things were moving along, every person I spoke to there assured me that everything was fine. Then I started getting more and more worried (I want to see evidence things are being taken care of - going on verbal assurances is not exactly the way I like to run a business, especially when you are dealing with something as vital to an Internet business as domain names are), and when I found out from Chipmunk at Moniker (anyone not know Matthew Sclier? you should, he's a great guy) that Moniker is a .eu accredited registrar, I started making inquiries with them as to the way the process is supposed to unfold. All the evidence was that Godaddy probably wasn't doing their job, there were simply too many holes (another call to Godaddy and more assurances everything was fine).
So I set up an account with Moniker to re-pre-register our .eu domains, went through a few trouble-shooting steps with Monte, and sure enough NOW I CAN SEE OUR PRE-REGS LISTED IN EURID.EU.
Now I'm both relieved that no one beat us to the punch, and to get this weight off my shoulders. But I quickly get really pissed off at having been deceived and jerked around by Godaddy for 2 months. So I call Godaddy and speak to both tech support and sales, including managers in both departments, and everyone of them repeats the same line: Eurid is completely backed up and that's why our original applications are not showing up in eurid/whois. I even walked them through the lookup to show them that receipt of the pre-reg is instantaneous in the eurid database (I showed them our domain pre-regs done through Moniker). There was no budging their stance, they insist that come April, when the land rush period begins, Eurid will assign our domains to our godaddy applications, completely deaf to the fact that it's a first-come, first-served process, and their applications are not showing up.
I just can't believe that a registrar could have such a cavalier and arrogant attitude to something so important as our fucking life line: domain names.
Maybe Godaddy does fine with .com and other TLDs, but if anyone of you is in the process of registering .eu's or is thinking about it, think twice about dealing with Godaddy (another thing about them: they refuse to refund over $1,000 in pre-reg fees we paid them for these .eu's). Learn from someone that just went through a painful process, talk to Chipmunk or Monte at Moniker, avoid godaddy like the plague.
Tony Pirelli, aka Intruder. cybernetbucks.com.
