.net to Celebrate 15 Million Registrations

Recently, .net hit a major milestone when its zone surpassed 15 million .net domains registered globally, making it one of the most popular domain extensions on the Internet today.  Supported by the same infrastructure and expertise that has powered .com for more than 15 years, .net is recognized around the world as an established and credible place to interact online. To mark this momentous occasion, we pulled together 15 facts about .net. How many .net facts do you already know?

15 Facts About .net:

1.    Almost 139,000 domains registered in other top-level domains (TLDs) immediately forward to the same name, but as a .net site.

2.    The first domain name to ever exist was a .net. While the first domain name to be registered was the now famous Symbolics.com, it is a lesser known fact that the very first domain name ever to exist was Nordu.net. Nordu.net was created by the registry with the same name as the first Internet rootserver (nic.nordu.net). Symbolics.com later went on to be the first domain name to go through the full registration process.

3.    Due to its unique status .net is not among the six other original generic top-level-domains in RFC920, the document which outlines the original domain name conventions. It was still created on the same day as the others though – 1/1/1985.

4.    Today the .net zone sits at just over 15 million registered domains, roughly 10 times more than in the year 2000 when there were about 1.5 million registered.

5.    The .net zone has doubled in size since 2006.

6.    In 2012, the average character length of .net domain names created was 12 characters.

7.    As social media grows in popularity, a trend of registering domain names and pointing them to social media accounts is emerging; most notably on Facebook. As of March 2013, 6,503 .net domain names pointed to Facebook. This is up from 5,039 in March 2012. That’s almost a 23% annual growth rate.

8.    Approximately half of the 15 million .net domains registered today are registered within the United States.

9.    .net domain names are hosted in more than 200 countries worldwide.

10.    Almost half (48%) of the .net domains registered in India have e-commerce functionality on their sites.

11.    A single .net domain name can be registered in as many as 350 different native languages thanks to internationalized-domain-names (IDNs). IDNs make the Internet more globally accessible and functional by enabling domain names in non-ASCII characters.

12.    Verisign applied for three transliterations of .net in Hangul, Simplified Chinese, and Devanagari last year through ICANN’s new gTLD program.

13.    The percentage of the total base of .net domain names that are registered in Japan (2.51%) is almost twice that of the percentage of the total base of .com domains that are registered in Japan (1.43%).

14.    DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) adds security to the DNS. Compared to .com, .net has almost double the percentage of DNSSEC enabled domains today.

15.    Today, more than 99.9% of 6+ character .net domain names are available.

It is clear that .net is one of the most visible and venerable parts of the Internet domain space. As one of the world’s most reliable and established domains, businesses seeking to establish their online presence have relied on .net for more than two decades. To learn more about .net and see if the domain name you want is available, visit VerisignInc.com/dotnet.

INTERNET GROWS TO NEARLY 220 MILLION DOMAIN NAMES IN THIRD QUARTER

Nearly five million domain names were added to the Internet in the third quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to nearly 220 million worldwide across all domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world.

The increase of 4.9 million domain names equates to a growth rate of 2.3 percent over the second quarter of 2011, and marks the third straight quarter with greater than 2 percent growth. The Internet saw the addition of 4.5 million domain names in the first quarter (a 2.2 percent increase) and 5.2 million domain names in the second quarter (a 2.5 percent increase).

The .com and .net Top Level Domains (TLDs) experienced aggregate growth in the third quarter, reaching a combined total of 112 million names. New .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million during the quarter. This is a 5.9 percent increase year-over-year in new registrations.

DOMAIN BRIEF HIGHLIGHTS NEW USE CATEGORIES FOR GTLDS
The latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief focuses on some of the new use categories that are likely to emerge out of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plan to introduce new generic TLDs (gTLDs).
The article examines how the new gTLD process could herald the emergence of a wide range of new uses for gTLDs that could change how Internet users interact with the global addressing system. These new use categories include gTLDs that represent specific brands, hobbies, geographic locations, cultural communities, internationalized domain names, industry sectors and specific Internet-enabled services.
Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2011 third quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at:http://www.verisigninc.com/DNIB

About Verisign 


VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) is the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world. Billions of times each day, Verisign helps companies and consumers all over the world to connect online with confidence. Additional news and information about the company is available at www.verisigninc.com.


Sourced From: 20:20 MSL,