Verisign Report: 296 Million Domain Names Registered Worldwide, 2 Million Added In Q2

VeriSign, Inc. announced two million domain names were added to the Internet in the second quarter of 2015, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 296 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of June 30, 2015, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The increase of two million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 0.8 percent over the first quarter of 2015. Worldwide registrations have grown by 16.4 million, or 5.9 percent, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the second quarter of 2015, reaching a combined total of approximately 133.5 million .com and .net domain names in the domain name base. This represents a 3.1 percent increase year over year. As of June 30, 2015, the domain name base of .com equaled 118.5 million names, while .net equaled 15 million names.

In the second quarter, Verisign processed 8.7 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.5 million domain names for the same period in 2014.

During the second quarter of 2015, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 111 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 182 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average decreased 7.1 percent and the peak increased 10.2 percent. Year over year, the daily average query load increased 16.6 percent and the peak query load decreased by 10.8 percent.

The Domain Name Industry Brief also highlights how the use of the DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) protocol can help address long-standing security gaps in the Internet. For many years, numerous cryptographically enhanced protocols have existed. Standards and suites like Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME), Transport Layer Security (TLS), IP Security (IPSec), Open Pretty Good Privacy (OpenPGP) and many others have offered a range of protections and have been implemented by a wealth of code. However, the reality is that Internet security protocols have excluded a very important step from their security analyses; secure key learning. Read “Using DANE for Authentication of Internet Services” to learn how this available protocol can address this issue.

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry. The second quarter 2015 Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at Verisign.com/DNIB. You can download the infographic here.