Domain universe breaks through 200 million

VeriSign is reporting that the number of registered domain names worldwide broke through the 200 million mark in the third quarter.
There were 202 million domains at the end of September, according to the company’s Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published today.
Over half of those domains, 103 million names in total, can be found in the .com and .net namespaces that VeriSign manages.
In a not-so-subtle plug for VeriSign’s 2011 growth strategy, the company also declared that the next ten years will be “The Decade of the International Internet”.

In the coming decade, the Internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fueled in part by the adoption of IDNs. By enabling online content and businesses to be represented in local scripts and languages, IDNs help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures, and connect the world in new ways. Over the past year, several new IDNs for ccTLDs have been approved. The next step will be approval of IDNs for generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

The company, of course, plans to apply to ICANN to operate IDN versions of .com and .net, although it has not to date discussed openly which languages or strings it wants.
The VeriSign report also says that ccTLD registrations grew 2.4%, compared to the same quarter last year, to 79.2 million domains.
I expect this growth would have been tempered had it not been for the relaunch of .co, which occurred during the quarter, but it does not merit a mention in the report.
The report also reveals that .info has overtaken .cn in the biggest-TLD charts, although this is due primarily to the plummeting number of registrations in the Chinese ccTLD.

Internet closes in on 200 million domain names

The internet will almost certainly break through the 200 million domain names milestone before the end of the year, judging from VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
There were about 196.3 million registered domains at the end of June, according to the report, up by 3 million on the first quarter and 12.3 million on the second quarter 2009. That’s 2% and 7% growth, respectively.
The drag factor on the overall market caused by the mass expiry of millions of Chinese .cn domains seems to have levelled off, making the growth a little more encouraging than in the first quarter.
Regardless, VeriSign said that 76.3 million domains were registered in the ccTLDs, basically flat when compared to the March numbers and a 2.5% increase year-on-year.
The ccTLDs may see a growth spurt in the third-quarter DNIB, due to the influence of .co’s launch, assuming another .cn situation does not arise in another TLD.
VeriSign doesn’t say as much, but if the ccTLDs only grew by a net 63,000 names, that means the bulk of the 3 million new domains were in the gTLDs, but it doesn’t break the number down by gTLD.
It doesn’t even say precisely how many .com/.net domains it manages, or what its growth rates were, just that the two TLDs’ combined total now exceeds 100 million.

Chinese TLDs now live, broad adoption achieved in just seven days

Check it out: 教育部。中国.
That’s one, but by no means the only, of the first live, fully Chinese-script domain names. It’s China’s Ministry of Education.
Previously, it had been announced that the .中国 internationalized country-code TLD would not go live until August.
But on Friday CNNIC said that 90% of China’s ministries have got their .中國 domains already, along with 95% of news websites, 90% of universities and 40% of China’s Top 500 enterprises.
Not only was that level of adoption achieved very quietly, it was also achieved very quickly. According to IANA, .中國 was delegated just seven days earlier, on July 9.
IANA also reports that .中國, the IDN for Hong Kong went live on July 12. Taiwan’s .中國 was delegated on July 14.
All of these Chinese-script TLDs were approved by ICANN’s board at the conclusion of the Brussels meeting last month.
It’s perhaps not surprising that ICANN did not broadly announce the latest delegations. It got burnt for pre-empting Arab nations’ publicity when the first IDN TLDs went live in May.
I wonder whether this will help CNNIC reverse the trend of declining registrations in its namespace. According to the latest statistics, the .cn has halved in size over the last year.

Domain name industry growth slowed by China crackdown

The massive slump in Chinese domain name registrations appears to have hit the overall domain name market significantly in the first quarter 2010, slowing its growth.
According to the latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief, only one million net new domains were registered across all TLDs in the period, a paltry 0.6% increase.
There were about 193 million domains active at the end of March, up from 192 million at the start of the year.
A million might seem like a lot, until you consider that the market grew by 11 million domains in the fourth quarter and by three million in the first quarter of 2009.
The slump is certainly due to the rapid decline in .cn domains.
China’s ccTLD had about 13.4 million names at the end of last year, and only 8.8 million at the end of March. April’s numbers show the decline continued, with 8.5 million names registered.
The China drag has been caused by a combination of pricing and the Draconian new identification requirements the communist government placed on the registry, CNNIC.
Chinese registrants now have to present photo ID before they can register a domain.
VeriSign’s own .com/.net business did a decent trade in the quarter, up 7% compared to the same quarter last and 2.7% on December to 99.3 million names in total.
With registrations growing by 2.7 million per month, this means VeriSign already has more than 100 million names in its com/net database.

China domain name registrations plummeting

The Chinese ccTLD has lost almost four million domain name registrations since it implemented Draconian identification requirements last December.
According to CNNIC, the .cn manager, there were 9.53 million domains registered at the end of February, compared to 12.28 million in January and 13.45 million in December.
That’s a loss of 3.9 million domains since the new registration requirements were introduced mid-December.
The bulk of the loss appears to have come from pure .cn names, which dropped from 8.61 million in December to 6.14 million in February.
The .com.cn namespace lost about half a million names over the same period. The rest of the drop-off came in lesser-used second-level domains such a .org.cn.
Since December 14, CNNIC has required all Chinese registrants to provide photo ID before they register a domain.
Recently, the registry has tried to enforce retroactive enforcement of this requirement, causing registrars including Go Daddy and Network Solutions to abandon the TLD altogether.