Fergie's Tech Blog

Some Interesting Stats on TLDs

Thanks to Bret Fausett for pointing out this article.

Antony Van Couvering writes on the Names@Work blog:

Since ICANN was formed November 1998, a net of one top-level domain has been lost.

While ICANN slowly allows new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to come online, another countervailing trend works to decrease the number of TLDs, as country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) go dark. I decided to keep score. For reference, here is the “official” list of ccTLDs from IANA.

The results are an exquisite testament to the slick hypocrisy of some governments, and more generally ICANN’s of Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), which insists loudly on the sovereign rights of governments to “their” TLD, because (they say) only governments can guarantee the public interest. Apparently they have decided that it’s in the best interests of the native residents of their colonial possessions to become invisible on the Internet.