2 Million .PL Domains Registered

There are now two million active .PL domain names the Polish registry NASK has announced.The milestone was passed on 3 January after 2010 closed with 1,994,120 domains and twenty years after the registration of the first .PL domain name occurred.It took 17 years for the one million .PL active registrations mark was passed on 6 May 2008, and then less than three years for the next million. In 2010, .PL registrations grew by an impressive 23 per cent, the highest growth of any ccTLD registry in the European Union.Over time, like many ccTLD registries, technology has changed and automated registration processes have been introduced such as in 2002/03. It was then that there automated registration system was introduced using EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) as the main communication medium. This period was also the time when the Partner Programme was created, which enabled partners of NASK to maintain and register domain names in the registry.NASK puts the impressive growth in a large part to their Partner Programme that created advantageous conditions for cooperation with its partners. In 2010, 37 new agreements were signed with entities from all over the world. Currently 148 entities are involved with in the Partner Programme. 81 of these are Polish, 45 European and 22 from other parts of the world. Partners of NASK manage over 98 per cent of .PL domain names.NASK has also taken education of the public as one of its roles, continually working to improve its image so that .PL would become a recognisable and well regarded. In 2010, NASK commenced its educational program in schools and universities with promotion of the national domain being its aim. This training and popularisation has one goal – that is having a domain name is the first step to becoming popular on the internet and opening oneself to the world.