Germany celebrated its 30th anniversary on the Internet. It was the 10th country to secure its national ccTLD.
On November 5, 1986, the country code .DE (ccTLD) became registered with the IANA, enabling the beginning of the Internet in Germany (Deutschland.)
DENIC, current managers of the .DE ccTLD, did not assume control right away. According to the DENIC history archives:
“Initially, .de was administered by the US-American network operator CSNET. In 1988, administration was transferred to IRB, a unit of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dortmund, which started to operate the name server service and the allocation of IPv4 address blocks.
The common term used internationally for this kind of service provider was “Network Information Center”, or NIC in short. And since this NIC took over the administration of .de, the name DENIC was born.”
At the time, the only .DE domains registered were dbp.de. rmi.de, telenet.de, uka.de, uni-dortmund.de, and uni-paderborn.de.
Today, more than 16 million .DE domains are registered.
Happy 30th anniversary, dot .DE! 😀
