In the early afternoon of 12 July 2007, the German domain registry DENIC processed the registration request for a special .de domain. With “pressious.de” the “schnappszahl” of 11,111,111 domains was reached. The domain holder is the owner of a printing shop in Westphalia. No more than one year ago DENIC eG celebrated the registration of the ten millionth .de domain. The number of domains registered with DENIC has been increasing at a constant rate of approximately one million per year for several years now, thus proving that .de domains are still first choice for German Internet users. With more than eleven million registered domains, the German Top Level Domain remains the largest country code TLD in the world.

“This presents an obligation for DENIC to guarantee a stable operation without interruptions for the domains administered under .de,” said Stephan Deutsch, member of the Executive Board of DENIC eG. “More than eleven million domains is first of all a success of the members of DENIC, who are the ones who maintain direct contact with the domain holders.”

.de Domains: A Success Story

Domains are basically no more than mnemonic aids for Internet users. Computers communicate amongst themselves using their so-called IP numbers (such as 110.246.96.50), which identify each one of them uniquely. Human beings, however, generally find it easier to remember meaningful combinations of characters rather than strings of digits. The Domain Name System (DNS) has created a means for linking the world of humans to the world of machines, since the DNS makes it possible to assign a domain uniquely to an IP address.

The structure of the DNS is hierarchical. Its pinnacle is formed by the Top Level Domains. Immediately underneath them, it is possible to register second-level-domains, which are often known simply as "domains" (for example: denic.de). Each hierarchical level is separated from the others by a dot.

The Top Level Domain .de has been in use as an address extension in the Internet for approximately twenty years. The necessary record for .de was set up in IANA's database on November 5, 1986. Starting in March 1988, members of the Informatikrechner-Betriebsgruppe at the University of Dortmund began offering a volunteer nameserver service for .de using the name DENIC (= German Network Information Center). At that time, the number of .de domains registered totalled six, and they were (in alphabetical order): dbp.de, rmi.de, telenet.de, uka.de, uni-dortmund.de and uni-paderborn.de.

The rate of growth in the number of domains has been far from steady in time since then. For several years to begin with, when the Internet still remained predominantly a university reserve, the rate of growth in the number of registered domains was only slow. The number of .de domains had thus only grown to a thousand or so when, in 1994, domain administration was transferred to the University of Karlsruhe as a project with outside funding.

It was following the invention of the World Wide Web, which can be considered as a sort of graphic user interface for the Internet, that use of the Internet began to expand like wildfire beyond the limited circle of research institutions and computer companies. This was paralleled with a growing interest in domains. At the beginning of 1997, just after DENIC eG had been created as a registered cooperative by the German Internet service providers, the number of addresses registered totalled around 50 000. It took just over two years (to April 1999) for this figure to climb to half a million. In the two years after that, the number of domains doubled every six months, and the five-million mark was reached in November 2001. In recent years, the growth rate has more or less stabilized at around a million new domains per year, which is the rough equivalent of two new .de domains coming into being every minute. With eleven million domains, .de has further consolidated the position it has held for many years as the world's largest country code and the second largest Top Level Domain globally, with only .com ahead of it.