120M Domains Registered

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Domain name registrations reached 120 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, representing a 32 percent increase over the previous year, and an eight percent rise over the previous quarter.

According to the Domain Name Industry Brief for the fourth quarter of 2006 released by VeriSign today more than 11.6 million new domain names were registered in the quarter.

This figure represents a three percent increase year on year with an average of 10.1 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2006, compared to an average of 8.7 million in 2005. Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) increased 31 percent year over year to 43.7 million, and 10 percent from the previous quarter with more than four million registrations. China added more than 500,000 domains in the fourth quarter alone, a 43 percent increase over last quarter. The base of .com and .net domain names grew to 65 million domain names by the close of 2006. New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of 2.1 million per month in the fourth quarter of 2006 for a total of 6.2 million new registrations in the quarter. VeriSign processed an average of 24 billion queries per day in operating the Internet infrastructure for .com and .net.

VeriSign chief security officer, Ken Silva, said with the number of global DNS queries increasing, the infrastructure has to be ready to respond.

"The network is changing, and with new services like voice and video migrating to the Internet, and the proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, it's important that the security and capacity requirements keep pace," he said. VeriSign recently announced Project Titan, a major initiative to increase capacity of its Internet infrastructure ten-fold by 2010 to accommodate future growth.

Information on the project is available at www.verisign.com/titan. Copies of the 2006 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.


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