BANGALORE: VeriSign, the global leader in domain names, today announced five million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2013, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 271 million worldwide across all top-level domains as of Dec. 31, 2013, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

Is it likely that we will run out of domain names? No, the number of possible second-level domain names in any TLD is an extremely large number. Refer to page 4 of the Domain Name Industry Brief for further explanation.

The increase of five million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9 percent over the third quarter of 2013. Worldwide registrations have grown by 18.5 million, or 7.3 percent, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2013, reaching a combined total of approximately 127.2 million domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net. This represents a 5 percent increase year over year. As of Dec. 31, 2013, the base of registered names in .com equaled 112 million names, while .net equaled 15.2 million names.

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