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ccTLD (country code top-level domain) is an Internet top-level domain, generally used or reserved for a country or a dependent territory. ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs. Creation and delegation of ccTLDs is performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and with certain exceptions noted below corresponds to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes maintained by the United Nations.
IANA (currently contracted to ICANN) is responsible for determining an appropriate trustee for each ccTLD. Administration and control is then delegated to that entity, which is responsible for the policies and operation of the domain; the current delegation can be determined from IANA's list of ccTLDs. Individual ccTLDs may thus have varying requirements and fees for registering subdomains. There may be a local presence requirement (for instance, citizenship or other connection to the ccTLD), as for example the European (eu) and German (de) domains, or registration may be open.
.de is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Federal Republic of Germany. DENIC (the Network Information Centre responsible for .de domains) does not require specific second-level domains, as it is the case with the .uk domain range for example. The name is based on the first two letters of the German name for Germany (Deutschland). In Spanish and Portuguese "de" is the genitive form (like "of" in English), so there are a lot of latin-speakers hosters that offer customized sites like elforo.de (the forum.of) or elblog.de (theblog.of), putting your name after it
.de is currently the most popular ccTLD in terms of number of registrations, and is second after .com among all TLDs. The first point of registration for .de domains was at the Dortmund University Department of Computer Science.
.de registrations may be directly ordered from DENIC but it is faster and cheaper to do so via a DENIC member (registrar). Registrations of internationalized domain names are also accepted.
"Munich has clawed its way back into the number-one position in DENIC's domain statistics. Taking the parameter of the number of .de domains registered divided by the number of inhabitants, there is no city in Germany that can equal the Bavarian capital. That is one of the key outcomes of the annual regional domain statistics published for 2006 by the German registry, DENIC. Looking at the individual German federal states, it was Thuringia in the east that achieved the highest growth rate at 10.4%, but there is still a very evident west/east differential in the distribution of domains. Nearly all the big domain concentrations are still to be found in the large conurbations in the western part of Germany, such as Hamburg, the Rhine/Main region and the Rhineland. It is also clear that .de domains are becoming more and more attractive outside of Germany too. At the end of 2005, around 160 000 .de domains were registered in the name of a holder outside of Germany. In the course of just one year, this figure rose to more than 580 000 – a gain of 266%."
Press Release 24.04.2007 DENIC.de |
