Fourteen months after .info domain names became available on the
Internet, the millionth .info Web site was signed up last week,
making it now the sixth largest domain online.
Afilias, which maintains the registry for .info names under a
contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN), will announce that the millionth .info Web site
name is registered to www.los-angeles-real-estate-search.info by
registrar Go Daddy Software.
Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer at Afilias, said the
registrations have grown steadily since the company began accepting
applications in September.
The .info domain is used by a wide range of organisations and
businesses that had been locked out of many desired domain names in
the already crowded .com domain, he said.
"If you try to get your business name in a .com name, it's really
difficult," LaPlante said. "This is the global home of information
on the Internet. It's not just about selling stuff. That's why it's
had such broad appeal."
About 265,000 of the one million registered .info sites are now
online and available to Web visitors, he said, compared with about
35% of .com names in active use, according to Afilias.
The .info names trail only .com, .net, .org, .de and .uk domains in
the number of registered Web sites.
.info was one of seven top-level domain names announced in May 2001
by ICANN to relieve congestion in the domain name space. By last
December, .info had about 675,000 name registrations.