The .de domains celebrate their birthday: exactly 15 years ago, on 5 November 1986, the record for .de was created in the IANA database and has been available in the root server of the Domain Name System ever since. From this day on domains could be registered below the country code .de and used freely. German Internet users have done that quite frequently in the last 15 years. In a few days DENIC eG in Frankfurt will register the five millionth .de domain.

However, the increase of domain names did not take place in a uniform way in the last 15 years. In the first years, when the Internet was still mainly used by universities, the number of domains increased only slowly. Only about 1,000 .de domains existed, when in 1994 the management of .de domains was transferred as a third-party funded project to the University of Karlsruhe. Previously employees of the data processing center of the University of Dortmund had voluntarily operated a nameserver service under the name DENIC.

After the invention of the World Wide Web as a kind of graphical user interface for the Internet in the middle of the 90s, usage spread rapidly outside of research institutions and computer companies. At the same time the interest in domain names grew. In the beginning of 1997, after DENIC eG was founded by the German Internet Service Providers, about 50,000 domain names were registered. Little more than two years later, in April 1999, their number had already grown to 500,000. In the following two years the number of domains doubled every six months. Currently there is a monthly increase of about 80,000 to 90,000 names - an equivalent of about two per minute. With 5,000,000 domains .de meanwhile has become the largest country code in the world.