DENIC (the .DE registry and Germany’s top-level domain name extension) has just announced that it has passed the 17 million registered domain name mark.
As one of the most successful ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains), DENIC’s press release provides some additional interesting statistics. For example, there are now 30,000 new registrations on average each month and DENIC has over 300 members (mostly domain name registrars) to register domain names on behalf of their customers.
The operation of DENIC is also quite unique in the world of domain names. Since its creation in 1996, DENIC has been organized as a non-profit cooperative. Like an agricultural cooperative, the members are the ones who benefit most from the success of the operations and have equal voting rights.
The registry added Registry Lock in 2020. An important security feature for sensitive domain names and trademark owners in the event of a registrar security breach.
When the European Data Protection Directive (GDPR) was introduced, the DENIC registry no longer required local presence in Germany for the registration of .DE domains.
Anyone in the world can register their dot-DE (1.5 million of them are registered outside of Germany), so we can only hope that top-level domain names from other countries will take into account and follow the example of DENIC to open up more to the world and allow anyone to register the top level domain extensions of their country.
There are now many registries, such as Afilias (which manages several ccTLDs) that could help any top-level domain name extension achieve this goal. Additionally, a lot of experience is being gained with new generic top-level domain names, which globally amount to 25 million registered names and which, at the time of this writing, now have 1171 extensions online according to the site. of popular statistics nTLDstats .com.