The Internet grew by almost 33 million domain names last year, according to the fourth quarter 2007 Domain Name Industry released Wednesday by VeriSign, a digital infrastructure vendor that manages Internet domain names such as .com.

Total registrations worldwide topped 153 million across all of the top level domain names, a 27% increase over the same quarter in 2006, and a 5% increase over the third quarter of 2007, according to VeriSign's brief ( pdf format ).

By the end of 2007, there were more than 80.4 million .com and .net domain name registrations, a 24% increase year over year and a 4% increase quarter over quarter, according to the report. That number took into consideration the domain names that were deleted by registrants in the five-day grace period before the end of the fourth quarter 2007, according to the report. During the five-day grace period registrants can delete a newly registered domain and get a full refund.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, new .com and .net domain name registrations were added at an average of 2.5 million per month, for a total of 7.5 million new registrations in the quarter. Registrations for country code top level domain names totaled more than 58 million, up 33% from 2006 and up 6% from the third quarter of 2007.

During the fourth quarter of 2007, VeriSign processed more than 33 billion DNS queries per day, the company said.

The report also highlighted the importance of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the successor for IPv4, the current version of the Internet Protocol used today. According to VeriSign, IPv6 is a significant improvement because it provides for a huge increase in the number of addresses that can be made available for networked devices.

"The widespread adoption of Internet-enabled wireless devices and gaming consoles has created a growing demand for larger IP address space," said Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of Naming Services at VeriSign, in a statement. "To stay ahead of this demand, VeriSign recently took steps to enable the A and J root servers for IPv6. This will help ensure that developing global infrastructures will have sufficient IP address space to innovate, to enhance the end-to-end connectivity for IPv6 networks, and to facilitate richer use of DNS."

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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