Continued stable growth in German domains, but with massive differences in regional distribution

On 20 August the domain registry DENIC received the request to register the nine millionth .de domain. The number of Internet addresses registered under the German Top Level Domain has thus continued to grow. Roughly a million .de domains are added every year. The country-code-ending .de remains the world’s second favourite after .com. Even people and organizations outside of Germany are keen to have .de domains. More than 80,000 holders of .de domains are based abroad, most of them in our neighbouring countries of Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Within Germany itself, the distribution of domains is still very uneven. Both in absolute figures and relative to the population, more domains have been registered in the west than in the east. That is one of the facts revealed by DENIC's domain statistics for 2004. As in previous years, the interpretation of the statistical material was carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Economic and Social Geography at the University of Cologne. There is no sign of any evening out of the geographic differences. The growth rates in all the new (i.e. eastern) federal states are somewhat higher than the nationwide mean of 17%, but they are only very slowly catching up on the older (i.e. western) federal states. The eastern city with the highest proportion of .de domains is Potsdam, but it holds only 23rd position in the national league table of municipal and rural local-government districts with the most domains per inhabitant. Potsdam has 143 domains per inhabitant, whereas the city currently top of the table, Munich, has 226, and the nationwide mean is 95.5. Only three cities or rural local-government districts in eastern Germany figure among the top hundred; along with Potsdam, these are Berlin (42nd) and Dresden (88th).