The number of new domain names on the Internet continued to move up last year, according to a report from Versign that pegs the 2010 total at 205.3 million. Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) said that total represents an overall increase of 6.3 percent or 12.1 million new domain registrations from the total for 2009.
But the growth rate has been uneven for different Top Level Domains (TLDs). For example, County Code TLDs (ccTLDs) ended the year at 80.1 million registrations, an increase of only 0.3 percent on a year-over-year basis. On the other hand, the .com and .net registries, which are operated by VeriSign, grew to 105.2 million domain names last year, a 9 percent year-over-year increase.
Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign told InternetNews.com that .com and .net are global brands that continue to have worldwide appeal. For 2011, Verisign is forecasting growth in the 7 to 9 percent range for the .com and .net registries.
VeriSign operates the .com and .net registries under a multi-year contract with ICANN that is set to last until at least 2012. VeriSign also has a contract with ICANN to operate some of the root DNS servers for the Internet.
Enterprise Networking Planet digs deeper into the numbers and what’s ahead.
