Information technology and society: 215 million domain names registered in Internet

The world's largest DNS operator Verisign has published a report, according to which in the second quarter of this year increment of the general base of domain names on the Internet was 2.5% versus the first quarter. In absolute terms, annual growth rate amounted to 5.2 million new domain names. Verisign says that by the end of the second quarter in all areas of the Internet domain, there were 215 million domain names.

DNS-operator reports that in the past year, the total base of registered domain names grew by 8.6% or 16.9 million domains. At the same time, Verisign said it is impossible to ascertain how many of the registered domains are actually used. Obviously, not all of the registered names operate serving an Internet site.

Verisign, the operator of the domain zones .com and .net, said in its report that about 88% of names in these domains lead to a particular site, which is in an active state. The overall base of domain names .net and .com is more than 110 million names, which is more than half of the total base of domains. The overall rate of the two zones for the last second quarter increased in quantitative terms by 1.8%, while in a year this figure rose by 8.3%. In absolute terms, we can say that in a year, these two zones increased by 8.1 million new domain names. Overall rate of prolongation of domain registrations was 73.1%, i. e. out of every 100 registered domains over 73 domains are prolonged for the second year or more.

In national geographic domain zones now operate 84.6 million domains, which is by 2.9% or 6.6 million domains more than in the first quarter. The largest increase in registrations has been recorded in the national domains of Brazil, Australia and Spain. The quarter growth is 4% each.

In general, the list of the largest national domains over the past quarter has changed slightly. Germany is leading with the zone .de, followed by Great Britain - .uk, China - .cn, European Union - .eu and Russia - .ru. Verisign noted that domain zones .cn and .eu have reversed in the second quarter.

In addition, the report says that the average load on the domain system in the second quarter was 58 billion queries for permission of domains worldwide. The peak quarterly value was 68 billion queries.