Liikanen: "European identity in cyberspace"

"The introduction of a new dot.eu internet domain will create a truly European identity in cyberspace for EU internet users," said Erkki Liikanen, European commissioner for internet policy, in a statement.

The European Parliament gave its support to the dot.eu proposal in late February.

The EU is planning to start searching for a private sector organisation to run the domain for it. This organisation will collect fees and administer the database of who owns which address, fending off cybersquatters and resolving domain disputes.

Who wants dot.eu?

But so far it is unclear how popular the new net suffix will be.

The EU has admitted that it had done no research to find out how many people might snap one up, and has said that it expects it to be "relatively popular".

Mr Liikanen told reporters that the majority of e-mail messages he gets ask when the dot.eu domain is due to appear.

However, some national registries have questioned the need for a supra-national domain that sits between country codes, such as dot.de and dot.es, and generic suffixes such as dot.com and dot.biz.