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The Wall Street Journal examines the disastrous roll-out of Europe's .eu domain, in which one in five domain name applications were rejected for technical errors. It's just a mess. No one agrees on the criteria for winning a domain name. Little companies bought up Hertz.eu, EDS.eu, NBC.eu, and such, with real intentions of hosting their 15-person businesses. GoDaddy says a third of the .eu registrants don't have other web sites, so they're probably speculators. Some landgrabbers set up fake registrars to snap up thousands of domains.

But the best story is AT&T's failure to get att.eu, now owned by a 70-employee stainless-steel product manufacturer with a bad-ass director:

Artur Tomczykiewicz, managing director of the Polish firm, says his firm has "all the right" to its new Web address: "We didn't have a chance to get ATT.com."

In Europe's Auction Of New Web Names, Strife and Confusion [WSJ]