I see a fair number of them - mostly by mid-sized European manufacturing companies. The rationale seems to be "Where's sprockets.at? Who knows? (Austria btw) sp

I see a fair number of them - mostly by mid-sized European manufacturing companies. The rationale seems to be "Where's sprockets.at? Who knows? (Austria btw) sprockets.eu? Probably in the EU." Usually there's a local country domain as well, with one of them being canonical.