I know the .com is king, and I always prefer to get .com for non-personal projects. However, I don't have much experience targeting primarily EU markets, so I'm not sure how common it is for EU businesses to be familiar with .eu domains.
Can anyone share their experience with .eu domains? Is it as popular as .com for EU or just a niche TLD created for the sake of consistency?
And yes, they will take away domains if you don't continue to meet the requirements - it happened to me (thanks, Brexit).
They tend to be cheap.
Some customers might not notice, for some it'll suggest you're heavily EU focused - be aware .fr, .de, etc are definately a thing, and some might mistake you for a government agency offshoot.
But I don't see it heavily associated with .lol, .info, .biz, etc.
The other side of the coin is that non-.eu customers may associate your products or services with only the EU, or perhaps feel excluded.
I am not sure about .fr, but I can tell you for sure that you won’t be mistaken as a government offshoot for using a .de domain, they are extremely common in Germany and are basically standard for any Germany business.
That being said, I guess many people could misunderstand the tld for your business being limited to Germany instead of Europe/EU in general
My biggest concern is being penalized by Google, or being seen as an abusive domain like .lol/.xyz
COM is fully under US jurisdiction (though really most of the DNS system is).
Options other than .eu and .com are not reliable. .org/.net/.biz are kinda niche and have their own associations (non profit/internet provider/business). All the new TLDs are sort of stupid, and in my (very little) experience, are not indexed well by Google. Countries TLDs like .de, .fr, etc - are very country specific and does not target EU as a whole
I trust .de domains too for the same reasons as that's a kind of default pan European domain mainly based on amazon.de and caseking.de.