Verisign ended the second quarter of 2021 with 170.6 million .com and .net domain name registrations in the domain name base, a 5.2% increase in 12 months, and a net increase of 2.59 million during the second quarter of 2021, according to the company’s second quarter 201 results.
The .shop new gTLD announced in mid-July it passed the one million registrations mark, one of only six new gTLD’s that has surpassed the milestone. Aimed at online businesses/ecommerce, it launched in late September 2016 and took 15 months to reach the half million milestone and just over 3.5 years to reach the million.
New Zealand’s ccTLD got a pandemic bump in domain name registrations in the year to 31 March, with registrations up almost 2% to what was then an all-time high to 723,451, according to the Domain Name Commission’s latest annual report released last week. Since then, registrations jumped another 1,002 to the end of June.
The boom in COVID-19 pandemic domain name registrations for .ie has continued into the first half of 2021, with the first half of 2021 being the best half year on record for the Irish ccTLD.
The Chagos Islanders, banned from their island chain by “apartheid-like laws and do not participate in the island chain’s booming Internet and defence-oriented economy” want their ccTLD .IO back. Two organisations, The Crypto Currency Resolution Trust (Bahamas) and The Chagos Refugees Group, have now lodged a complaint with the OECD “detailing consumer and human rights harms committed by Afilias”.
The .berlin new gTLD has retained its position as the most successful Digital City Brand in 2021 according to the fifth edition of DOTZON’s Digital City Brands study.
united-domains AG, a subsidiary of United Internet, has signed up to ipcom GmbH’s Anycast service RcodeZero DNS, joining a list of registrars and registries administering over 23 million domain names around the world.
Germany’s .de cruised past the 17 millionth domain milestone on 13 July 2021 with the registry, DENIC, naming the milestone domain as melba-stoffkreation.de. The passing of the milestone reinforces the German ccTLD’s position as Europe’s largest.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about huge changes in the world, mostly negative, but there were some positives and areas of growth. One of these was evidence many businesses went online that weren’t online before, and new business ideas were developed. For Canada’s .ca, the registry released data last week that suggests more Canadians are choosing a .ca domain name for their websites more than ever before with the growth rate nearly tripling since last year, from 0.35% in March 2020 to 0.99% in March 2021. As of the end of March 2021 there were 3,106,723 .ca domain names registered, up from 2,867,598 a year earlier. Today there are 3,157,305 .ca domain names registered.
British .eu registrants have been given a final reminder that unless they update their registration details to an eligible address by 30 June 2021, their domain names will be “withdrawn” on 1 July 2021. The only exception is for those .eu registrants within the UK who are citizens of the European Union or the wider European Economic Area.