Dubai: A quarter century after the birth of dot.com and a decade after the great internet bubble, the world wide web obviously is as lively as ever.
By the end of 2009, 192 million domain names were registered by internet users, according to latest figures provided by US internet infrastructure provider Verisign, which operates the.com and .net top level domains.
In the fourth quarter of 2009 alone, some 11 million domain names were registered, "reflecting a steady pace of internet growth," a Versign spokesperson told Gulf News.
The registrations were made across all of the top level domain names and reflect an eight per cent increase in new registrations from the third quarter 2009, she added.
The renewal rate is stable with 71 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009 from 70.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Expansion
"VeriSign believes in the long-term potential of the internet," the spokesperson said.
"While there are fluctuations in domain name registrations, as the larger economy expands and contracts, the internet continues to show sustainable growth year over year," she said.
"There is a widespread misperception that internet usage stalled with the bursting of the new economy stock market bubble in 2000. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
"Rates of average daily domain name system queries, online merchant sales and e-mail usage increased 129 per cent, 239 per cent, and 98 per cent respectively from 2001 to 2003."
In 2000, there were more than 20 million .com domain names registered. Since that time, .com has grown at a steady rate, with more than 80 million .com domain names registered around the world today. What's more telling are the statistics regarding internet usage.
"In 2000, VeriSign saw an average of approximately 500 million DNS queries per day versus an average of 50 billion queries per day today, with a query representing an internet user visiting a web site or sending an e-mail. Back in 2000, the average internet user interacted with VeriSign's DNS infrastructure four times per day, versus 30 times per day today," the spokesperson said.
"In 2010, as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of .com, more people continue to get online and use the internet in different ways. There will be spikes and periods of ebb and flow, as there are many factors that affect domain name registrations. The economy is one of them, as is the latest business and social trends," she added.
"For example, the social media trend has spurred an increase in registrations as has the explosion of video on the internet. So there are lots of factors that affect registrations, with the economy being just one of them."
With this development, infrastructure plays a crucial role for internet usage. "With DNS queries continuing to grow faster than domain name registrations, VeriSign is continually looking at measures to strengthen the infrastructure to keep up with internet usage — and to maintain the 100 per cent uptime of its network as it has over the past 12 years," the spokesperson said.
Creating communities
"Over the last two decades, the internet has created communities, transformed economies and made the world a smaller place," added Mark McLaughlin, CEO of VeriSign. President Clinton has been at the forefront of this change, both during his administration, when the internet emerged as a social phenomenon, to today through his works with the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation."
VeriSign has a very important place in the internet's DNS infrastructure.
The company is the authoritative registry operator for two of the most important top-level domains, .com and .net.
It is also the contracted registry operator for the country code top-level domains .cc (Cocos Island) and .tv (Tuvalu).
Global domain name system
Domain names are means of identification in the internet. They are based on the domain name system (DNS) and follow a hierarchy. On the highest level in the DNS systems, country domains and generic top level domains are located (.com, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil, .org).
The domain system is managed by the non-profit organisations Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (Iana). The operation of top level domains is outsourced to infrastructure provider, among which Verisign operates the authoritative registries for .com, .net, .name, .tv and .cc. Registry and renewal is managed by designated domain name registrars, of which Go Daddy, eNom, Tucows, Network Solutions and 1&1 Internet AG currently are the busiest.
