DENIC (the registry of .DE and the top-level domain name extension of Germany) has just recently announced that it has cracked the mark of 17 million domain names registered.

As one of the most successful ccTLD’s (country-code top-level domain names), the press release of DENIC is providing some additional interesting statistics. Such as that there are now 30k new registrations on average every month and that DENIC has over 300 members (mostly domain name registrars) to register domain names on behalf of their customers.

The way DENIC operates is also quite unique in the domain name world. Since its founding in 1996 DENIC has organized itself as a not-for-profit cooperative. Similar to a farmers’ co-op, members are the ones who benefit the most from the success of the operations and have equal voting rights.

The registry has added Registry Lock in 2020. An important security feature for sensitive domain names and brand owners in case of a registrar security breach.

When the EU data protection directive (GDPR) was introduced DENIC registry no longer required the local presence in Germany for the registration of .DE domains.

With anyone in the world being able to register their dot-DE (1.5 million of them are registered outside of Germany) we can only hope that other country top-level domain names will consider and follow the example of DENIC to become more open to the world and allow anyone to register their countries top-level domain extensions.

There are now plenty of registries out there, such as Afilias (which manages several ccTLD’s) that could assist any country top-level domain name extension in achieving this goal. Also, a lot of experience is gained thanks to the new generic top-level domain names, which overall now stand at 25 million names registered and which, at the time of this writing, now have 1171 extensions online according to the popular statistics website nTLDstats.com.