Happy Anniversary .Net

• By • Domain Names
For the last 30 years, .net has been one of the most popular domain name extensions on the planet. It is responsible for millions of thriving online businesses and countless intersections of communication, education and entertainment. It is where the very first domain name ever created, Nordu.net, made its home online, and is now home to approximately 15 million domain names.
Take a look at the infographic below to see a few more ways .net continues to be integral to online activity and find yourself a memorable .net domain name today at www.Verisign.net/net.
Happy Anniversary .Net
Click image to see full infographic

How Will Your Registration Data Be Managed in the Future?

• By • Domain Names

Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” As we consider how Internet domain and address registration data is managed and accessed in a post-WHOIS era, and given the long history of failure in addressing the shortcomings of WHOIS, it is extremely important to start preparing now for the eventual replacement of WHOIS. This is the fundamental purpose of the next Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) that is scheduled for Sunday, July 19, 2015, in Prague, Czech Republic.

ROW 2015-2 will take place at the Hilton Prague hotel, the same venue as the 93rd meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF-93). The workshop will be dedicated to discussion and planning for development and testing deployments of the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), a recent work product of the IETF that is documented in Request For Comments (RFC) documents 7480, 7481, 7482, 7483, and 7484. RDAP was designed from the beginning to address the many shortcomings of WHOIS, but we have very little experience with early-stage implementations that can be used to inform the policy decisions that need to be made. Additional information about WHOIS and RDAP can be found in my “Where Do Old Protocols Go To Die?” blog post published earlier this year. (more…)

Registration Operations is More Than Just Registering Domain Names

• By • Domain Names

Perceptions can be difficult to change. People see the world through the lens of their own experiences and desires, and new ideas can be difficult to assimilate. Such is the case with the registration ecosystem. Today’s operational models exist because of decisions made over time, but the assumptions that were used to support those decisions can (and should) be continuously challenged to ensure that they are addressing today’s realities. Are we ready to challenge assumptions? Can the operators of registration services do things differently?

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Verisign Celebrates #30YearsofCOM

• By • Domain Names

This year marks 30 years since the first .com domain name – Symbolics.com – was registered, and the internet and world as we knew it changed forever. Verisign, the authoritative registry operator of .com, is celebrating its 30th anniversary and the remarkable impact .com has had on the economy and culture.

In the last 30 years, the internet has evolved from an unknown phenomenon used primarily by academics and researchers to a global communication, commerce and information sharing channel that few could imagine life without; in fact, nearly three billion people around the world are online today, and more than $300 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales and over $1.3 trillion in global e-commerce sales rely on the internet.

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Internet Grows to 288 Million Domain Names in the Fourth Quarter of 2014

• By • Domain Names

Today, we released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which showed that the Internet grew by four million domain names in the fourth quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 288 million. This is a 1.3 percent increase over the third quarter of 2014. [1]

TLD by Zone Size Q4 2014

.com and .net Breakdown

New .COM and .net registrations totaled 8.2 million, bringing the combined number of .COM and .net TLDs to 130.6 million domain names in the domain name base by the end of the fourth quarter of 2014.

gTLD Breakdown

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2014, 478 new gTLDs were delegated into the root; with 65 new gTLDs delegated during the fourth quarter of 2014. [2]

The chart below captures the initial 60-day registration volume rank for those new gTLDs reaching 60 days of General Availability (GA) during the quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2014, 78 new gTLDs reached 60 days of GA and of those, the 10 largest new gTLDs, as measured by zone size at the end of the quarter, were: [3]

10 largest new gTLDs by zone size Q4 2014

ccTLD Breakdown

Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) reached 134.0 million domain names. The top 10 ccTLD registries by domain name base were:

ccTLDs by Zone Size Q4 2014

DNS Query Load

Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the fourth quarter of 2014 was 110 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 146 billion. Year over year, the daily average increased 33.5 percent and the peak increased 47.1 percent.

DNS Query Load Q4 2014

For more domain stats from the fourth quarter of 2014, check out the infographic below and the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief.

[1] The gTLD and ccTLD data cited in this report are estimates as of the time this report was developed, and is subject to change as more complete data is received. Totals include ccTLD Internationalized Domain Names.

[2] The total number of gTLDs and their registrations is published through the Centralized Zone Data Service: https://czds.icann.org/en

[3] The new gTLDs that reached 60 days of General Availability during the fourth quarter was determined using: ntld stats

Internet Grows to 284 Million Domain Names in the Third Quarter of 2014

• By • Domain Names

Today, we released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which showed that the Internet grew by four million domain names in the third quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 284 million. This is a 1.6 percent increase over the second quarter of 2014. [1]

Largest TLDs by Zone Size

TLD by Zone Size Q3 2014
Source: Zooknic, Q3 2014; Verisign, Q3 2014; Centralized Zone Data Service, Q3 2014

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Where Do Old Protocols Go To Die?

• By • Domain Names

In Ripley Scott’s classic 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, replicant Roy Batty (portrayed by Rutger Hauer) delivers this soliloquy:

“I’ve…seen things you people wouldn’t believe…Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those…moments…will be lost in time, like (cough) tears…in…rain. Time…to die.”

The WHOIS protocol was first published as RFC 812 in March 1982 – almost 33 years ago. It was designed for use in a simpler time when the community of Internet users was much smaller. WHOIS eventually became the default registration data directory for the Domain Name System (DNS). As interest in domain names and the DNS has grown over time, attempts have been made to add new features to WHOIS. None of these attempts have been successful, and to this day we struggle with trying to make WHOIS do things it was never designed to do.

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What’s Really New in the New gTLD Space?

• By • Domain Names

As someone who has long studied trends in the domain name industry, the opening of hundreds of new gTLDs has intrigued me for quite some time on many levels. One question I found myself pondering was: Will new gTLDs create “new” naming trends or redundant domains across many TLDs? With more than 3 million domains delegated in the new TLD space there is now a corpus to study to answer this question.

The short answer is clear from these first two pie charts which illustrate the percentage of the second-level domains (SLDs) that were available in .com as of 12/15/2014:

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