With a total of 64.5 million domain names currently registered and 4.6 million new sites registered during the second quarter of 2004, an increase of 2.5 percent since the first quarter, VeriSign’s report indicates that registration levels have returned to the same point that they were at in the late 1990s before the dot-com bubble burst.
According to the report, renewal rates for .com and .net names have also increased to 71 percent, and VeriSign's global Internet Registry is processing more than 14 billion domain name lookups per day, on average.
“What’s significant in looking at today’s Internet infrastructure is that not only are domain registrations themselves continuing to grow, but so are the numbers of Internet users and overall Internet usage,” said Raynor Dahlquist, acting vice president of VeriSign's Naming Services.
“The numbers of overall domain registrations coupled with the number of lookups processed each day by VeriSign’s global Registry, indicate that Internet users are setting up more websites and using those websites to perform commerce and communications on the Internet in greater frequency than ever before,” Dahlquist continued.
Emerging as one of the fastest growing segments of registered domain names are country code Top Level Domains, which now account for the second largest group of registered domains at 39 percent.
The report comes on the heels of a new lawsuit filed in a Los Angeles District Court by VeriSign against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that VeriSign contracts with to operate the global database for .com and .net domains.
In their claim, VeriSign asserts that ICANN intentionally tried to hinder VeriSign’s business ventures.
A similar case was thrown out of federal court in August.
VeriSign’s contract to handle .net domains, which the report indicates account for 31 percent of all web page views and 32 percent or roughly $100 billion of business-to-consumer transactions every year, expires in 2005.
