Germany's .de close to 14 million mark, still small compared to .com

Germany’s .de domain, the largest ccTLD in use, is very close to hitting 14 million registrations. This comes at the same time as news that the Netherlands .nl extension is close to 4 million registrations.

Of course, these numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to the 88.4 million active .com domains. There were 45,477 new .com registrations in the last 24 hours alone.

Britain’s .uk domain currently has 8.6 million registrations. The vast majority of these are .co.uk names. Of the 157,463 new .co.uk registrations in June, 147,455 were on the .co.uk subdomain! Internetblog’s extension, .org.uk, only had 8,297 registrations.

Photo | attilio_82

.NL domain registration

The .nl registry, SIDN, will be introducing a new system designed to make .nl registrations simpler and faster. Dubbed DRS5, it will remove a great deal of the paperwork and hassle from the process.

For example, it will no longer be necessary to sign a form when making changes to a domain registration. Changing registrars and canceling names will become much easier.

The new system is expected to go live in February 2010. Most other TLDs moved to this type of technology a long time ago. No doubt the Dutch will be very happy about the new changes.