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Internet domain names grow to 177 Million
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 19 February 2009, 22:31 IST |
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Bangalore: With 24 million new domain names being added in 2008, total base of internet domain surged to 177 million. This represents a 16 percent growth over the previous year.
As per the findings of U.S. based web infrastructure services provider VeriSign, in the fourth quarter of 2008, more than 10.1 million new domain names were registered across all Top Level Domains (TLDs). The five largest TLDs in terms of base size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org. The composition of the domain name industry and rank order in terms of base size remained consistent in the fourth quarter. The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 90.4 million at the end of 2008. This represents a 12 percent increase over the previous year and a one percent increase over the third quarter of 2008.
Expanding the access to the internet, all Internet service providers are working to provide a way for people of all languages to navigate the web. One method of addressing this is to implement domain names represented by local language characters, such as Japanese Kanji symbols, rather than the ASCII letters and numbers used in English and most European languages. Known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), these TLDs use local language characters to represent the domain name, and then to follow them with a common ASCII TLD, such as .com or .net.
"The potential for internationalized TLDs to enable a universally accessible Internet is promising. But it must be done right. A careless or rushed approach will expose the community to a high risk of failure over technical and business issues," said Jill McNabb, Vice President, Naming Services at VeriSign. Though more than 47 domain name registry operators support IDNs, concerns over public confusion and ease of use, uneven browser support, and local network limitations have triggered a growing desire in the Internet community to provide a fully localized navigation experience by extending internationalization to the TLD itself.