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[DENIC Presse <presse AT denic.de>]

PRESS RELEASE

Dear Sir or Madam,
           
       
Three characters marked the emergence
of the information society in Germany 25 years ago: .DE

About 100,000 times per second an Internet
address ending with .de is called up from somewhere in the world. Today,
there are more than 14.6 million such addresses, and about 3,000 new ones
are added every day. Dimensions that go beyond the imagination of even
the most visionary Internet pioneer and that have fundamentally changed
social and economic communication habits within only a quarter of a century.

5 November 1986 
The first step towards this evolution was made on 5 November 1986,
when the country code .de was included in the official list of IANA (Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority), the organization responsible for the global
coordination of the central functions of the Internet. With this entry,
domains with the country code for Germany were permitted to be registered
for the first time in history. By now, nearly every state in the world
has its own so-called country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), including
the Vatican city state (.va). In 1986, however, the Federal Republic of
Germany was one of the first of a total of ten countries that was represented
on the Internet. Since then, .de could distinctly extend its leading position
and featuring more than 14.6 million registered domains today now clearly
holds the first rank among the ccTLDs, followed by Great Britain (.uk)
with 9.7 million and the Netherlands (.nl) with 4.7 million registrations.
Only the generic TLD .com scores higher than .de with 97.6 million registered
domains. Very little known in contrast is .dd, the country code that was
reserved for the German Democratic Republic. Due to the German reunification
in the year 1989, it was never actually used. You will find detailed tables
and maps on the domain evolution in the various geographic areas and cities
of Germany at http://www.denic.de/en/background/statistics/regional-distribution.html


The Internet becomes available to
the mass public
Initially reserved mainly for scientists and technologists, the Internet
started to attract a broader public at the end of the nineties. This interest
was driven by developments such as the WWW web browser launched by Tim
Berners-Lee and his page description language HTML, which together with
the transfer protocol HTTP enabled the Internet as it exists today. Browsers
and graphic user surfaces made the medium suitable for mass use. Already
then, there hardly was any German enterprise without its own web appearance
to communicate a modern image, to advertise its products or services and
to test innovative sales channels. About ten years after the launch of
.de, computers became available at discount prices and conquered private
households. More and more shopping and banking transactions were implemented
from home. A new digital market emerged, which was soon discovered and
tested also by international groups. For Yahoo, Amazon or Ebay, .de was
the one of the first addresses for launching their business model on the
international market. 25 years after the introduction of .de, on average
159 of 1,000 German citizens have a .de domain. In purely arithmetical
terms, thus every sixth has their own Internet appearance. And also in
factual terms, nearly 80 percent of all domain holders are private persons.

A social and economic factor
The Internet does not only generate new business models, also the business
procedures have changed considerably. E-mails transfer offers to their
recipients by just one mouse click, video conferences accelerate development
processes and virtual networks enable teamwork right from the home office.
All this is possible thanks to the Internet because it bridges any distance
in time and place all over the world. Communication technology and the
Internet are involved in nearly every business transaction today. For 2010,
the Federal Statistical Office recorded Internet access of 82 percent of
all German companies, of course differing according to industry and branch,
and regular use of computers with Internet access of 62 percent of all
employees. For globally operating groups as well as for the locally operating
organic farmer the Internet has become an integral part of business communication.
Since the start of the new millennium, an increasing number of private
persons is adding content to the Internet. Enthusiastic travellers and
amateur photographers, persons testing products at home or young couples
with their own wedding site make use of new web offers and self-explanatory
user surfaces. In the so-called web 2.0, everybody can become part of the
community and contribute to the diversity of the Internet in blogs, forums
and digital networks. 

DENIC – a vital pillar
Increasing user numbers prove the growing popularity of the Internet.
Whilst Infratest 2001 reported 37 percent of the citizens above fourteen
to use the Internet in Germany, this figure will be 74.7 percent for 2011
. Simultaneously, the number of registered .de domains more than doubled
during this period, from 5.1 to nearly 14.7 million. The organization behind
.de is DENIC eG (Deutsches Network Information Center),
a neutral service provider founded in 1996. Organized as a German cooperative,
DENIC unites 280 German and international (about 17 percent) companies
of the Internet industry. Besides its function as the central registry
of .de domains, DENIC also is responsible for the troublefree operation
of the technical infrastructure of .de and has thus been an essential pillar
of the German Internet for 15 years. "In a complex, continuously changing
environment like the Internet, DENIC has rendered registry services of
perfect quality over a long period," praises Vint Cerf, who generated
a crucial technical basis for the Internet already in the 1970ies when
he contributed to the creation of the TCP/IP protocols and has essentially
shaped the evolution of the web since then. He attests the impartial provider
of the German country code Top Level Domain an extraordinary performance.
Two leading-edge data centers in Frankfurt am Main and Amsterdam and a
worldwide multiple redundant server network of the latest generation ensure
that .de domains are reachable all around the clock within a fraction of
a second from everywhere in the world. The structure of DENIC as a neutral
cooperative operating as a private-sector not-for-profit organization is
in line with the democratic idea of the medium Internet, which wants to
take into account the interests of all stakeholders.


In case of any queries, please refer
to:

DENIC eG
Public Relations
Kaiserstraße 75 – 77
60329 Frankfurt am Main
GERMANY

Email: presse AT denic.de
Phone: +49 69 27235-274 
Fax: +49 69 27235-235
http://www.denic.de

-- 

DENIC eG
Kaiserstraße 75-77
60329 Frankfurt am Main
GERMANY

E-Mail: presse AT denic.de
Fon: +49 69 27235-274 
Fax: +49 69 27235-235
http://www.denic.de

Angaben nach § 25a Absatz 1 GenG:
DENIC Domain Verwaltungs- und Betriebsgesellschaft eG (Sitz: Frankfurt
am Main)
Vorstand: Sabine Dolderer, Helga Krüger, Carsten Schiefner, Dr. Jörg Schweiger
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Elmar Knipp
Eingetragen unter Nr. 770 im Genossenschaftsregister, Amtsgericht Frankfurt
am Main

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