The current year started with about 9.5 million domains across the region. But as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, growth in registrations increased noticeably. From 2016 until early 2020, the maximum monthly growth was 1.55 percentage points. Between May and July this year, increases in each member ccTLD ranged from 1 to 3 points, with July -at 3.04- being LACTLD’s peak in the last five years.

From April to November 2020 there was a marked upward curve in the number of registered domains with a sharp increase of 300,422 domains from June to July (the highest in recent years). To understand the magnitude of this achievement and the rapid growth, precisely just one year ago the number of domains was 9.4 million.

“Reaching 10 million domains in the region is, without a doubt, a very important event for our Association. We are very happy because this does not happen by chance, but it responds to a solid and consistent work at regional level -that coincides with the sustained growth we have had in recent years-”, said Luis Arancibia, LACTLD’s President.

“At the same time, the fact this milestone occurs in an extremely complicated 2020 globally, denotes the effort and resilience of both our organization and our members, in collaboration with all entities that are part of the Internet Ecosystem in the region. Without doubt, this makes us very happy, along with assuming it as the opening to a horizon of new challenges”, he added.

Even though this is an important milestone for LACTLD, its tasks transcend this achievement. Work such as bringing its members closer to judges, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies through the Illegal Content Forum, and the strengthening of the DNS in the region via projects such as LACTLD’s Anycast Cloud are some examples of its work for Internet development.

LACTLD is a non-profit association created on 20 August, 1998, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP). It currently has 29 members.