Public DENIC mailinglist

[DENIC Presse <presse AT denic.de>]

PRESS RELEASE

Dear Sir or Madam,

On 5 November 2011, Germany's Top
Level Domain .DE will be 25 years young! Largest country code TLD with
more than 14.6 million registered domains - more than 7 billion name server
queries per day - elected TLD with best brand image by the Internet community:
a fairytale balance!

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 pioneers and that have fundamentally changed
social and economic communication habits within only a quarter of a century.

5 November 1986: How it all began
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). With this
entry, domains with the country code for Germany were permitted to be registered
for the first time in history. In chronological terms, the Federal Republic
of Germany thus was the tenth country to be presented on the Internet.
Due to the German reunification in the year 1990, the country code originally
reserved for the German Democratic Republic - .dd - was never used.

Thanks to its stable infrastructure
and the comparably liberal registration conditions in (West) Germany, .DE
soon gained the leading position among the country code Top Level Domains
(ccTLDs) and clearly holds the first rank still today with more than 14.6
million registered domains. Second comes Great Britain (.uk) with currently
about 9.7 million, followed by the Netherlands (.nl) with 4.7 million registrations.
Only the generic TLD .com scores higher than .DE with a domain inventory
of currently just under 97.6 million. 25 years after the launch of the
German country code, on average 178 of 1,000 citizens of the Federal Republic
hold a .DE domain. In purely arithmetical terms, thus every sixth German
citizen has their own Internet appearance. And also in factual terms, nearly
80 percent of all domain holders under .de are private persons.

During the first ten years, administration
and DNS service for .de were provided by universities, at the start even
from the USA. Only in 1988, a German institution, the University of Dortmund,
took over administration and care of the first six .de domains (dbp.de,
rmi.de, telenet.de, uka.de, uni-dortmund.de and uni-paderborn.de – chronological
order of registrations unknown) from the US-American CSNET. In 1994
– by then the domain inventory had increased to about 1,000 domains and
thus tied up a critical amount of resources – the tasks of the Deutsches
Network Information Center (DENIC) were transferred
to the data center of Karlsruhe University within the framework of a project
with outside funding. Mandated was the project by the Interest Group of
the German Network Information Center (IV-DENIC ), which was founded in
1993 by the academic DFN association, commercial service providers and
the German Special Interest Group for Internet (Deutsch Interessensgemeinschaft
Internet e. V., DIGI) – an association of non-academic users. Until DENIC
eG in its current form as a cooperative was founded by 37 German Internet
service providers in December 1996, the University of Karlsruhe remained
responsible for the administrative tasks and until 1998 also for the technical
administration of .DE. Only then, all central services of the Top Level
Domain were concentrated in Frankfurt am Main, where DENIC started its
business as a neutral service provider at the beginning of 1997 - with
a domain inventory that had reached six-digit dimensions for the first
time. DENIC's headquarters are still located in Frankfurt am Main today.

DENIC – a vital pillar
During the 15 years of its existence,
the operator of .DE organized in form of a cooperative and comprising today
280 member companies of the German and international Internet industry,
thus representing a broad cross-section of the diverging interests of all
Internet user groups, repeatedly took a leading role in further developing
the registry services and setting technical standards: To start with, DENIC
was a pioneer when it introduced the registry/registrar model as early
as in the 1990ies, long before any other of the large TLDs considered this
model. In the registry/registrar model the Internet service provider assumes
the role of an agent who connects the registry and the final customer via
an electronic interface. DENIC also was the first country code registry
that started to run its name server network completely independently in
2003. And in 2004, the Cooperative was one of the first TLDs that included
IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) in their character set permitted
for domain names.

In 2007, DENIC expanded its own data
center operation and implemented a comprehensive redundancy concept. Basic
data centers of dual redundancy at two geographically distant locations
– Frankfurt am Main and Amsterdam – now guarantee utmost resilience and
security. These mirror data centers are not only used for the registration
system, the domain database, backups and the information services (such
as whois), but also for controlling the multiple-redundant name service
network, which is located at the currently most important Internet hubs
in the world. All in all, 16 state-of-the-art name server clusters of the
latest generation with sufficient backup reserves to be upgraded according
to requirements, as necessary, ensure that .DE domains can be reached all
around the clock from any place in the world within a fraction of a second.
Thanks to the capacity reserves of the applied solution – dimensioned
for several million queries per second – .DE is perfectly prepared for
the technological challenges of the coming years.

Within the scope of DENIC's new field
of business, infrastructure services, third-party TLDs may book secondary
DNS services since 2010 and thus benefit from the worldwide accessibility
and the high computing performance of DENIC's name servers. At present,
the two anycast clouds of .DE (i.e. computers located at nine different
geographical locations that are addressed via one single IP address) are
used under the cost sharing model by the ccTLDs of Austria and Luxemburg.

At the end of May 2011, after 18 months
of testing, DENIC introduced the protocol extension DNSSEC (Domain Name
System Security Extensions) for the .DE zone. More than 200,000 second
level domains under .DE are currently signed,thus can be checked on authenticity
– the most renowned of them is paypal.de.

Excellent brand image
In the meantime, the business model
of self-controlled domain administration including the independent operation
of the related technical infrastructure has long proven successful in Germany.
After now 15 years of administering and providing technical support for
.DE domains, DENIC stands for competence, reliability and integrity and
enjoys much trust and respect among German politicians.

Not only pioneers like 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, attested the neutral operator
of the German country code Top Level Domain an extraordinary performance:
"In a complex, continuously changing environment like the Internet,
DENIC has rendered registry services of unchanged perfect quality over
a long period."

That this opinion is shared by the Internet
community was proven by a EURid study executed in 2010, which investigated
the ranking and the attractiveness of leading TLDs. 400 participants respectively
in ten countries gave the German country code TLD top marks. .de emerged
as the leader in this study before .com and .co.uk. The evaluation criteria
applied were brand "Awareness", "Relevance" and "Preference"
as well as service quality.

Already in 2009, the annual report of
the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the world's largest independent
group for combating cybercrime, had rated the .de zone one of those with
the highest phishing resistance and thus also underlined the outstanding
reliability of the German TLD.

Commitment beyond .de
Faithful to its principle of registration,
"first come, first served", DENIC as a neutral cooperative operating
as a private-sector not-for-profit organization feels committed to the
basic concept of democracy and non-discrimination of the Internet. This
commitment is mirrored in the various sponsoring activities of the Cooperative:
As part of its strategy to promote the development of (open) standards
and thus provide sustainable benefit to the Internet community, DENIC has,
for example, been a sponsor and member of the Steering Committee since
2009 and has thus supported the development of the new version of the world's
most frequently used name server software BIND by the Internet Systems
Consortium (ISC) and has contributed the important user perspective. On
top of that DENIC invests in excellent training for the leaders of tomorrow
as one of the main sponsors of the European Summer School of Internet Governance
(EURO-SSIG), which – conducted by experts from universities and companies
of the Internet industry – prepares an international group of participants
for the future challenges of the global administration of the Internet
every year.

WWW as an economic factor
According to a McKinsey study published
in May 2011, the Internet sector as a key industry generates 3.2 percent
of the German gross domestic product and thus – not only due to a growth
rate of 24 percent in the last five years – has become a more important
economic factor than the energy industry or agriculture. Even after 25
years .DE is and remains a critical element of this success.


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

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

____________________________________
Mailinglist-Managenment:
http://mailinglists.denic.de/mailman/listinfo/public-l