New Delhi, Dec 2 (IANS) What began modestly in the late 1960s as a way to connect research establishments by the US military has grown phenomenally to become the Internet, networking and empowering billions of people worldwide in myriads of ways. For instance, the latest Wikileaks, comprising million of documents, demonstrate the power of the Internet to change the world and bring transparency in governance.
Today, the ‘Net’ is the world’s single biggest source of information on every known and unknown subject and the world’s largest mail-order catalogue. More than a billion people were using the Internet by 2005. The world is observing The Decade of the International Internet (2000-2010).
Driving this spectacular growth has been the engine of dotcoms and dotnets, the legions of domain names which populate the net, becoming household words. Currently, the year’s third quarter closed with a base of nearly 202 million domain name registrations, up by 3.8 million over the second quarter’s figures and 13.3 million or seven percent over the year.
The Domain Name System (DNS) divides the Internet into a series of component networks called domains that enable e-mail and other files to be sent across the entire Internet. Each and every site in the Internet is linked with one of the domains.
Universities, for example, belong to the ‘edu’ domain. Other domains are gov (government), com (commercial organizations), mil (military), net (network service providers), and org (nonprofit organizations).
The combined base of dotcom and dotnet domain names has surpassed 103 million. New registrations totalled 7.5 million during this year’s third quarter, representing an increase of seven percent from a year ago. The dotcom/dotnet renewal rate for the third quarter was 72.8 percent, down from 73.2 percent for the second quarter, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by VeriSign, Inc.
VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load (number of queries) during third quarter 2010 was 66 billion per day, with a peak of 78 billion. Compared to the same period in 2009, the daily query average increased 23 percent and the peak grew by 27 percent.
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief also spotlights the importance of International Domain Names (IDNs), as the growth of the Internet spreads around the globe.
Today the English-speaking world makes up nearly 40 percent of Internet users. Africa had less than five million Internet users a decade ago; now, it has more than 100 million. In 2000, Asia was level with Europe and North America for users; today it has more than those two continents combined.
In the coming decade, the Internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fueled in part by the adoption of IDNs.
By enabling online content and businesses to be represented in local scripts and languages, IDNs help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures, and connect the world in new ways.
The IDN Software Developer’s Consortium last met in Amman, Jordan, on Oct 29,
and included representatives from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia. The next consortium meeting will be in Cartagena, Colombia, during the ICANN meeting.
VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole.
(Shudip Talukdar can be contacted at shudip.t@ians.in)
