On Monday, 26 June 2006 DENIC, the German domain administrator, processed the ten millionth application for a .de domain. This makes .de the second Top Level Domain, after .com, to pass the hurdle of ten million registered domains. The holder of the jubilee domain, huettenberger-case-fabrik.de, is a manufacturer of transport cases from Linden, a small town in the vicinity of Frankfurt.

Sabine Dolderer, member of the Executive Board of DENIC eG, summed up the milestone in these words: "the registration of the ten millionth .de domain represents a major success for DENIC and its more than 250 members. It also shows that the organization of the Top Level Domain .de as a self-regulated initiative of the industry concerned has worked out well. Thanks to DENIC's open structure as a registered cooperative and its registration terms and conditions, in which restrictions have been kept down to the strictly necessary minimum, a highly diverse provider market has been able to develop over the last ten years. It is a market in which everyone interested in holding a domain can find precisely the offer that suits them best at an attractive price. For German Internet users, .de domains remain the first choice for their presence in the worldwide network. The attractiveness of the German country code TLD is further borne out by the fact that the only domain ending which has a larger worldwide domain base is .com."

Sabine Dolderer continued: "DENIC views this success as a duty upon itself to continue to administer .de as one of the technically most advanced registries and to guarantee a stable and secure operation. For us, reaching ten million domains is not going to mean any relaxation in our efforts. On the contrary, it is going to spur us on to make sure that, every day, we live up to the domain holders' expectations that we will provide a truly top-grade service. In so doing, we know that we can continue to rely on the excellent cooperation with our members, who are the ones who maintain direct contacts 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 5 November 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 ten 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.