DENIC (.DE) now has more than 17 million registered domain names

DENIC (the .DE registry and top-level domain name extension for Germany) recently announced that it has passed the 17 million registered domain name mark.

As one of the most successful ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domain Names), DENIC’s press release provides some additional interesting statistics. For example, there are now 30,000 new registrations on average each month and DENIC has over 300 members (mostly domain name registrars) to register domain names on behalf of their clients.

The way DENIC works is also quite unique in the domain name world. Since its creation in 1996, DENIC has organized itself into a non-profit cooperative. Similar to a farmers’ cooperative, the members are those who benefit most from the success of the operations and have equal voting rights.

The registry added Registry Lock in 2020. An important security feature for sensitive domain names and brand owners in the event of a registrar security breach.

When the European Data Protection Directive (GDPR) was introduced, the DENIC registry no longer required a local presence in Germany for the registration of .DE domains.

With anyone in the world able to register their dot-DE (1.5 million of them are registered outside of Germany), we can only hope that more top level domain names will be registered. A country will consider and follow DENIC’s example to open up more to the world and allow anyone to register their country’s top-level domain extensions.

There are now many registries, like Afilias (which manages multiple ccTLDs) that could help any top level domain name extension achieve this goal. In addition, a lot of experience is being gained from the new generic top-level domain names, which now total 25 million registered names and which, at the time of writing, now have 1,171 online extensions according to the website. popular statistics nTLDstats. .com.