VeriSign: Internet has almost 210 million domains

By Geoff Duncan May 30, 2011

Verisign Top-Level Domain Registrations

The Internet may have run out of IPv4 address space earlier this year, but that doesn’t seem to have put any damper on the worldwide market for Internet domains. According to a new Domain Name Industry Brief from VeriSign (PDF) at the end of the first quarter of 2011 the total number of top-level domains registered around the world was over 209.8 million, an increase of 4.5 million (or 2.2 percent) over the fourth quarter alone. Overall, domain registrations grew by 7.9 percent (15.3 million) during the last year.

For the year, the ten largest top-level domains in order were .com, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu, .cn, and .ru. Although there are more than 240 top-level domains in use around the world, some 61 percent of all registrations in the last year were in those top ten domains.

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Although registrations in top-level domains representing individual countries—like .jp, .uk, .ca, and .us—saw a 5.1 percent increase during the year, the venerable .com and .net continue to be popular, with a combined total of 108 million domains registered in those two TLDs alone, and some 8.3 million new registrations during the fourth quarter. Those domains also have high renewal rates, with 73.8 percent of domains in those TLDs getting renewed.

That doesn’t mean some country codes aren’t seeing significant upticks in their usage, though: .uk has managed to bump .org from fourth to fifth place, while .nl and .eu each moved up a place while China’s .cn actually dropped. However, the country TLDs with the largest proportional growth were actually Australia’s .au and Canada’s .ca.

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Canon to Apply for Its Own Top-Level Domain

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The possibility of company-specific TLDs got preliminary approval from ICANN back in June 2008; however, the organization has been working to iron out how the process would be managed and what requirements would be both workable and fair to companies involved. (This is the same organization that hasn't been able to set up a .xxx TLD for over a decade.) However, the new TLD more-open TLD system isn't expected to go into place until the latter part of 2011—and that's at the earliest—so Canon is truly jumping the gun with its announcement.

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VeriSign Buys Certicom Out from Under RIM

In late 2008, BlackBerry maker RIM was all set to take over Canadian security software firm Certicom…but right at the end of the year things suddenly got strange with Certicom claiming RIM's bid to take over the company was too low. Now, VeriSign has swooped in and inked its own takeover deal for Certicom, in a transaction valued at about $73 million…or, really, about $40 million once Certicom's cash-on-hand and short-term marketable securities transfer over to VeriSign. VeriSign's takeover of Certicom comes after RIM withdrew its takeover offer on Tuesday after an Ontario court granted Certicom's request for an injunction on the deal. RIM offered CDN $1.50 per share for Certicom (about $1.22 USD); VeriSign is paying CDN $2.10 (about $1.67 USD) per share for the company. VeriSign's primary interest in Certicom is Elliptic Curve Cryptography (EEC) technology, a form of public key encryption that uses mathematics that, in theory, enable higher levels of security with shorter key lengths. "This transaction combines the strengths of both companies in a unique, strategic fit," said VeriSign executive chairman and interim CEO Jim Bidzos, in a statement. Certicom's leadership in Elliptic Curve Cryptography technology allows VeriSign to develop adjacent market opportunities closely aligned with our core SSL business. We expect our customers and the market will benefit from the combination of Certicom's high quality encryption technology and VeriSign's proven certificate services infrastructure." Licensees of Cericiom's EEC technology include RIM, Motorola, and General Dynamics.

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VeriSign Raising Domain Registration Fees

Domain registrar and net infrastructure operator VeriSign announced today that it will raise the fees for registering .com and .net domains by $0.40 beginning October 1, 2008. The fee increases are allowed under Verisign's agreement with ICANN; under that agreement, Verisign can raise fees for .com domain registration in four of the six years between 2006 and 2012. The new fees for registering a .com domain will be $6.86; a .net domain will run $4.23. These fees are components of th overall cost to register a domain; various registrars have different fee structures, but will likely pass along the fee increases directly to domain buyers. VeriSign says continued increased in Internet traffic, the proliferation of consumer-driven Internet services, and the need to further fortify the TLD's infrastructure against "increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks" are behind the fee increases. The company says it plans to increase the capacity of its overall Internet infrastructure tenfold by 2010, pushing bandwidth at key operation centers around the world to over 200 Gbps and expanding its DNS capacity from being able to handle 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day.