Internet is now world’s single biggest source of information on every known and unknown subject. It has the world’s largest mail order catalog with more than a billion people using, as of 2005, driven by growth of dotcoms, dotnets and the legions of domain names.

The world, which is observing ‘the decade of the international Internet’ (2000-2010), closed the third quarter with a base of nearly 202 million domain name registrations, up 3.8 percent over the previous quarter and 13.3 million or 7 percent over the year.

US military began connecting with research establishments in the late 1960s to grow phenomenally to become the Internet, which networks and empowers billions of people worldwide in different ways. The latest WikiLeaks website, which comprises million of documents, demonstrate the power of the Internet to change the world and bring transparency in governance.

The combined base of dotcom and dotnet domain names has surpassed 103 million. New registrations totalled 7.5 million during the third quarter, representing a rise of 7 percent from a year ago.

The dotcom/dotnet renewal rate for the third quarter was 72.8 percent, down from 73.2 percent for the second quarter, according to the latest ‘domain name industry brief’, published by VeriSign Inc.

VeriSign's average daily domain name system (DNS) query load (number of queries) during third quarter 2010 was 66 billion per day, with a peak of 78 billion. Compared to the same period in 2009, the daily query average rose 23 percent and the peak grew by 27 percent.

The latest ‘domain name industry brief ‘also spotlights the importance of International Domain Names (IDNs), as the growth of the Internet spreads around the globe.

Today, the English-speaking world makes up nearly 40 percent of Internet users. Africa had less than five million Internet users a decade ago. Now, it has more than 100 million. In 2000, Asia was level with Europe and North America for users. However, today it has more than those two continents combined.

Internet will continue to be a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool fueled partly by the adoption of IDNs, which help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures and help connect the world in new ways, in the coming decade.

Online content and businesses represented in local scripts and languages will also help in enabling adoption of IDNs in the next decade.

The Domain Name System (DNS) divides the Internet into a series of component networks called domains that enable e-mail and other files to be sent across the entire Internet. Each and every site in the Internet is linked with one of the domains.

Universities, for example, belong to the edu domain. Other domains are gov (government), com (commercial organizations), mil (military), net (network service providers), and org (nonprofit organizations).

VeriSign publishes the 'domain name' industry brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole.

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