Peter comments on Sedo’s press release (and also compares it to .INFO):

The .EU registry is riding on the tails of a massive educational and political campaign by most if not all EU members, which was designed to acquire buy-in from the population for the consolidation of the Union in the first place. Add this to the fact that the European market has been competing to catch up with North America on the Internet for a long time and you see how there would be a jump on this bandwagon of an EU based domain space that’s meaningful to all yet also transcends any language barrier.

For me the success has largely been a surprise, and I cannot shake the feeling that most of the names have been registered mostly by speculators, who are now selling their names to other speculators. But hopefully I am wrong. We’ll see when the first big .EU website launches.
After all it would be nice if European countries felt more positively about the European Union than in the past and identified themselves with the EU as a whole…

[via ClickToHit]