CircleID

Why not compare registration of domains to annual beer consumption or some other equally stupid metric.

What would make more sense would be to compare domain registrations by registrant country to such things as (a) rank of registrant country by .com domains registered, or (b) rank of countries by names registered in the corresponding ccTLD.

One would still expect some anomalies, but comparing .eu domains registered to population is outright dumbth, when there IS data on the domain registration rate per country, which is a more relevant metric, since there already is baseline data which roughly suggests the "natural" registration rate.

Trademark attorneys and corporate attorneys were pimping Luxembourg incorporation services and Benelux trademark applications long before the .eu sunrise started.  Requiring a piece of official paper as a proxy for "legitimacy" in these silly sunrise procedures only makes the process of obtaining one of those pieces of official paper one more step in the process of registering domain names.  The problem, per usual, is a set of rules made by people who think they know how the world should work instead of people who actually work in this world.  Absolutely nothing was learned from the .info sunrise process, and similar stupid results were obtained here.

Some data:

http://www.zooknic.com/Domains/Domains_by_country.pdf

As of the year 2000, the Netherlands ranked 7th in the world in domain names registered.

http://www.zooknic.com/Domains/Domains_per_capita.pdf

On a per capita basis, in 2000 Luxembourg outranked Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and several other EU countries.  So at least with respect to Luxembourg, this "anomaly" has been around a long time.