First of all let me clarify – even though Germany is known for it, not all of Germany celebrates Oktoberfest. The different areas of the country have different customs and dialects. One thing they do have in common is the widespread use of the .DE ccTLD.

In the late 80s the Group that operated the Computers in the Computer Science Department (“Informatikrechner-Betriebsgruppe”, IRB) of the University of Dortmund set up a nameserver for the use by the German Internet community, which was very small at the time. A service like this was known as Network Information Center (NIC), which lead the group to name their service DENIC. DE stands for Deutschland and is the two letter abbreviation for the country as per the ISO 3166-1 list.  DENIC remains the name of the registry operator today.

Initially the domains that needed to be registered were just added to a list – the work was done by volunteers. Soon it became evident that the system needed to be enhanced in order to match the increasing amount of requests for “domain registrations”. So in August of 1993 the three big German Internet Service Providers at the domain created an organization (Interessenverbund Deutsches Network Information Center – IV-DENIC) which opened the operation of the nameservers for bidding. The bid was won by the University of Karlsruhe which took over operation of the management and registration of domains in January of 1994 for the term of three years. At the time there were about 1,000 .DE domains registered. By mid-1996 this number had increased to 20,000 domains. It was obvious that another reorganization was imminent.

December 1996 the IV-DENIC (which had grown to 36 ISPs over the years) meet and decided to create a cooperative society to operate the registry and provide the infrastructure. The DENIC eG was born in a rather unique model, since the providers/registrars owned and managed the registry. While the coop opened a new office in Frankfurt am Main in July of 1997, the technical operations remained in Karlsruhe until January of 1999. The rapid growth of the .DE ccTLD meant that a rapid growth of employees for the coop – from initially two employees the organization has grown to well over 110 employees today.

Today .DE is the ccTLD with the most registered domains and even beats the .NET gTLD with over 13,730,000 domains (June 16th, 2010).  The main challenger to .DE’s ranking, .CN, has recently fallen behind again due to new restrictions for registrants introduced by the registry.

March 2004 IDNs

With the amazing growth of .DE, the domain aftermarket has experienced a similar spurt. Sedo, founded in Germany and with its head office in Cologne remains a favorite marketplace for many domain traders,  but sales also happen on other platforms. If you follow the sales reports you will often notice .DE domains, but also German language keywords in other TLDs being traded. The highest reported sale was shopping.de for €1,960,000 (appx. $2,860,000 USD at the time) which made the third spot in DNJournal’s 2008 sales chart.

As always, when investing in ccTLDs it makes sense to get a feeling for the local culture and habits. For example hyphens are popular in German domains and used to separate words. As you may also know German uses “umlauts” (meaning non-English characters) in their language and have been able to register IDN domains since March 2004 and have shown and increase of traffic over the years.

Frank Michlick lives in Montreal, Canada with his wife and son. He moved to Canada from Germany in 2000. Frank operates DomainName-News.com together with partner Adam Strong and consults domainers, registrars, resellers and hosting companies with his company, DomainCocoon. As the chairman of the DomainConvergence conference in Canada he is currently planning the next event in September. He also serves as VP of Communications for DOAC.