30 Facts About .Org Domain Names

The .org extension is celebrating it’s 30th anniversary this week. Here is a list of 30 fun facts about .org that you probably don’t know.

1. Mitre Corporation, a research and development center sponsored by the United States federal government, was the first .ORG domain name to be registered in July 1985. (http://www.domainforum.us/t45-facts-about-org)
2. The term “WorldWideWeb” was coined in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.
3. .ORG was a part of the original 6 Top Level Domain (TLD) names created in the 1980s. (http://compnetworking.about.com/od/dns_domainnamesystem/tp/Useful-Facts-About-the-Domain-Name-System-DNS.htm)
4. The internet was born on January 1, 1983 as ARPANET, a Pentagon-sponsored network.
5. .ORG is the third largest top level domain name – with over 10 million .org domains registered. (http://pir.org/pdf/dashboard_2H_2014.pdf)
6. United States holds the most .ORG domain names with a vast 56.4%, Germany coming in second with holding 4.8%. (http://pir.org/pdf/dashboard_2H_2014.pdf)
7. Before opening up to the commercial traffic in the late 1980s, the internet was a relatively small community consisting of computer scientists, U.S. military and government personnel, and government contractors.
8. In 2014, Asia-Pacific had the highest number of new .ORG registrations outside the U.S. (http://pir.org/pdf/dashboard_2H_2014.pdf)
9. The World Wide Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, also known as The Father of the Internet, was awarded knighthood for his work. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3357073.stm)
10. Originally, the .ORG domain name was created as a “catch-all” – meaning if an entity didn’t fit under the educational, commercial, or governmental rubric, it would find a home in .ORG.
11. The visitor load on the server with the first website grew by a factor of 10 every year, during the Web’s first few years.
12. On January 1, 2003, the Internet Society (ISOC) won the bid to assume the responsibility of the .ORG domain.
13. From 2004 to 2007, .ORG doubled in size, expanding from three to six million registrants.
14. The internet has reached over 3 billion users, or 40% of the world’s population. (internetlivestats.com/internet–users)
15. Information is the largest demographic field of .ORGs that exist – holding 19.2% of the share. (http://pir.org/pdf/dashboard_2H_2014.pdf)
16. Over 8.7 billion machines are currently connected to the internet. (http://www.dailyinfographic.com/2014-recap-the-top-10-most-interesting-internet-facts-infographic)
17. The transition of .ORG from the previous operator to Public Interest Registry was the largest transfer in Internet history – more than 2.6 million domains were transferred in about a day. (http://pir.org/about-us/history/)
18. Tim Berners-Lee famously wrote the first web server and the first web browser on a NeXT computer, a workstation developed by Steve Jobs. (book)
19. On June 24, 2012, .ORG hit the 10 million mark with the registration of the domain name, jadforum.org, an organization that is dedicated to advancing the sustainable and regional development of the Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin.
20. Although used interchangeably, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing.
21. The Internet is the physical infrastructure that connects networks all over the world, while the World Wide Web is just one avenue (of many) to transfer data, through a string of characters also known as a URL.
22. .ORG is mutually exclusive, or created separately from domain names that are .org.[countrycode], such as .ORG.AU or .ORG.UK.
23. Although contrary to popular belief, the .ORG domain name is an open platform that can be registered by anyone including individuals, businesses, and organisations.
24. The shortest domain names (e.g. Y.ORG) have only recently started being registered – Y.ORG was registered by the YMCA.
25. The longest length allowed for a Top Level Domain (TLD) is 63 characters with the dot and “org” included. Currently, there are 33 .ORG domains registered with the maximum including, societyofdescendantsofknightsofthemostnobleorderofthegarter.org.
26. ORG cannot be registered by anyone, used only for private testing and documentation purposes. (http://www.iana.org/domains/reserved)
27. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the private sector administrator that maintains the global domain name space. They are on a .ORG
28. ISOC founded Public Interest Registry in 2002 to be the operator of the .ORG domain name.
29. In 2009, .org became the first generic TLD to implement Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) as a means to address security vulnerability in the domain name system (DNS).
30. 1.37 million .ORG domain names were registered in Asia-Pacific in 2014, a 16% increase over December 2013.