Measuring ccTLD Growth

Last month, DENIC eG, the registry for Germany’s country code top-level domain (ccTLD), announced it had surpassed 18 million .de domains, nearly 50% more than the next most-used ccTLD.

On Pulse, we collate the number of ccTLD domains in each country via Domain Tools as part of our Internet Resilience Index, Traffic Localization sub-pillar. When Internet traffic stays local—meaning that content is served from servers within the same country as the user— it is faster, more reliable, and more affordable.

In light of this localization milestone, I thought it would be good to understand the factors behind the growth of .de domains and to look at how other ccTLDs are faring.

Why Are .de Domains So Popular?

The exceptional adoption of .de is a result of several factors:

• Early adoption: Germany's early adoption of its ccTLD registry (1996) created a network effect, making .de the baseline standard for digital presence long before alternative generic TLDs gained widespread traction. A 2022 survey found that 71 percent of respondents would add the .de extension to a URL they don’t fully remember, compared to 14 percent who would add .com.
• Regulatory alignment: Under German telemedia law, commercial websites targeting the country are required to maintain a comprehensive legal disclosure that details business ownership, registration details, and the legal address. Operating on a .de domain encourages alignment with local legal frameworks, reassuring both regulators and consumers that the entity is accountable under German jurisdiction.
• Growing non-domestic registrations: More than 2.15 million .de domains are held by entities outside Germany, who are aiming to establish a trusted foothold in Europe's largest economy.

Germany Wasn’t The First to 18 Million

The first ccTLD to reach 18 million was .tk, the ccTLD for Tokelau, a self-governing territory of New Zealand in the South Pacific Ocean comprising three tropical coral atolls with around 2,000 inhabitants. Obviously, these domains weren’t all for local businesses.

Unlike Germany, Tokelau outsourced its registry operations to a non-local company called Freenom (Dot TK). Freenom offered .tk domains along with .cf, .gq, .ml, and .ga completely free of charge with minimal identity verification. This led to a massive influx of registrations, making .tk one of the largest domain extensions in the world by volume—at its peak, there were around 58 million .tk domains. Today, there are around 78,000.

This significant drop was triggered by a $500 million lawsuit by Meta over widespread cybercrime and trademark infringement, which led Freenom to halt all new domain registrations in 2023, and resulted in a massive cleanup of malicious sites that had been using the domain. Table 1 shows this, along with the fall of the other four ccTLDs that Freenom was managing, among the top six largest drops since 2019.

The drop in Taiwan’s .tw and China’s .cn domains has been linked to large numbers of speculative domain investors not renewing their domains.

It’s also worth noting declines in countries experiencing prolonged unrest over the last seven years, including Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, and Lebanon, although there is no correlation with a drop in the number of registered businesses.

Expanding eCommerce, Policy, Nationalization, and New Technologies Spurring Growth

Many of the ccTLDs that have seen the biggest gains in the last seven years (Table 2) correlate with those that have seen significant rises in eCommerce growth. Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, and Türkiye all rank within the top 20 countries by e-commerce market size.

Registry policy changes, structural reforms, and government grants and extensions have also played a major role in expanding the domain count for several of these extensions, including:

• .au registry, auDA, launching direct second-level .au registrations(e.g., brand.au instead of just brand.com.au) in 2022.
• .in registry, NIXI, launching low-cost Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) covering 22 scheduled languages across 15 scripts targeting rural micro-enterprises.
• .id registry, PANDI, aggressively promoting second-level .id domains alongside traditional .co.id options, accompanied by nationwide digital literacy campaigns aimed at small businesses.
• .tr registry, TRABiS, streamlining domain allocation, removing document requirements for .com.tr, and enabling direct .tr domain registrations in 2022.

Rising data privacy regulations—such as GDPR in Europe, LGPD in Brazil, DPDP in India, and local data residency laws—have also led regional businesses to adopt local domain infrastructure to signal compliance and national alignment.

In the case of Russia (.ru) and Iran (.ir), international sanctions and foreign-registry suspensions have led Russian and Iranian businesses, government agencies, and platforms to migrate away from foreign gTLDs (.com, .net) to ensure local DNS routing and regulatory compliance.

Meanwhile, .co and .cc domains continue their strong growth, marketed as cheaper, simplified alternatives to .com and, in the case of .cc, adopted by the cycling community (cc standing for Cycling Club) and the Christian Church.

Finally, the rise in popularity of .ai and .io correlates with the rise in popularity of Artificial Intelligence and technology/online gaming, which use the ccTLDs for brand awareness. In the case of .ai, this now accounts for nearly 50% of Anguilla's entire government revenue.