13 million domains registered under .de – Top Level Domain .de still growing

.de domains crossed another million mark. On 19 August 2009, the German registry DENIC received the registration request for the thirteen millionth .de domain: gallery-december.de is the name of the jubilee domain. The holder is Gerald Zörner from Berlin.

The German Top Level Domain increases by about one million registrations every year. For both private and commercial Internet users in Germany .de domains are the first choice. Statistically, in 2008, about every seventh inhabitant of the Federal Republic of Germany had registered a domain (13.6 percent). 461,294 of these are so-called IDNs, i.e. they contain umlauts or characters with accents. The fact that the 13 millionth domain has an English name is underscores the great variety and attractiveness of .de domains.

.de domains: A Success Story
Domains are basically mnemonic aids for Internet users. Computers communicate amongst themselves using their so-called IP numbers, 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 Top Level Domain .de has been in use as an address extension in the Internet for approximately twenty years. The necessary foundation was laid on 5 November 1986. Starting in March 1988, members of the Informatikrechner-Betriebsgruppe at the University of Dortmund began offering a volunteer name server service for .de using the name DENIC (= German Network Information Center). At that time, the number of .de domains registered totalled six. When domain administration was transferred to the University of Karlsruhe in 1994, the number of .de domains had grown to a thousand or so. It was following the launch of the World Wide Web (www) that interest in domains exploded. When the German internet provider DENIC eG was founded at the beginning of 1997, the number of addresses registered totalled around 50,000, in April 1999 this figure had climbed to half a million. In the two years after that, the number of domains doubled every six months. In recent years, the growth rate has more or less stabilized at around a million new domains per year. With the new record of thirteen million registered domains, .de is the largest ccTLD in the world. Only .com, which however is not a country code Top Level Domain, administers more domains.

This success is mainly due to the excellent work of the DENIC members. Working as service providers they hand on their end customers' requests for .de domain registrations to DENIC.

About DENIC
As the central registry, DENIC administers the now 13 million domains under the Top Level Domain .de and thus provides a crucial resource for users of the Internet. It sees its role as that of a competent, impartial provider of services for all domain holders and Internet users. With more than 116 employees, DENIC creates the foundation through its work for German Internet pages and e-mail addresses to be accessible throughout the world. The about 270 members of the Cooperative are IT or telecommunications businesses based in Germany and elsewhere. Working in cooperation with them and other partners, DENIC is committed to guarantee the secure operation of the Internet and its further worldwide development as a not-for-profit organization. It operates the automatic electronic registration system for its members, runs the domain database for the Top Level Domain .de and the German ENUM domain (.9.4.e164.arpa), manages the name server services for the .de zone at currently 15 locations distributed throughout the world, and renders a considerable contribution to the further organizational and technical development of the Internet in cooperation with international bodies (e.g. ICANN, CENTR, IETF).