Tuesday, August 14, 2007

2,5 million NL domains

Last week Wednesday the counter of the Dutch domain registrar SIDN stood at 2,5 million domain names with the suffix .nl. Presently the Netherlands rank fifth in the country code league, after the EU which registered more than n domain names since April of this year.



The Dutch domains have been growing steadily since 1996, when SIDN was founded by Boudewijn Nederkoorn (MD of SURFnet), Ted Lindgreen (MD of NLnet) en Piet Beertema (Centre for Mathematics and informatics). Piet Beertema was the godfarther of the .nl suffix and the first Dutch registrar since 1986, when the suffix.nl came into existence as a country domain name (ccTLD). When SIDN started to structure the rules for application better in 2003 there has been a continuous growth in .nl names. In 2003 the milestone of 1 million domain names was reached; three years later in August 2006 2 million Dutch domain names had been registered.

The Netherlands ranks fifth in the list of country codes. SIDN offered the following list of countries
1. Germany (.de): 11.159.466 domain names
2. China (.cn): 6.149.851 domain names
3. UK (co.uk): 6.126.785 .co.uk domain names
4. Europe (.eu): 2.514.525, domain names
5. Netherlands (.nl): 2.000.000 domain names
6. Argentina (.ar): 1.343.715) domain names
7. Italy (.it): 1.325.188) domain names
8. USA (.us): 1.3 million domain names
9. Brasil (.br): 1.134.533) domain names
10. Switzerland (.ch) 975.357) domain names

The suffix .eu has passed the Dutch suffix.nl in less than half a year, since the EU register was opened in April 2007. Despite this competition the Dutch registrations have realised a growth of 25 pct. Also the abolishment of private name domains did not stabilise the figures. Since 2003 it was possible for private persons to register their name for a domain. Not much use was made of this; besides it gave problems with frequent names in Dutch like Jansen, Janssen, Janssens. In 2007 SIDN decided not to give out those names any longer to private persons and offered to those who possessed such a domain name money to have the name scrapped.

Blog Posting Number: 838

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