DSTI/ICCP/TISP(2004)2/FINAL 

Figure 8.  Correlation between new gTLDs registration and ccTLDs registration in OECD countries (except the 

United States), December 2003 

new gTLDs registration per 100 inhabitants

R

2

 = 0.6377

0.7

Switzerland

0.6

0.5

Netherlands

Germany

Austria

0.4

Sweden

Denmark

Norway

Australia

0.3

United Kingdom

Luxembourg

Canada

0.2

OECD average

New Zealand

IrelandKorea

Belgium

Spain

Finland

0.1

Iceland

France

Italy

Japan

Czech Republic

Slovak Republic

Portugal

Greece

Turkey

Hungary

Poland

0.0

Mexico

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

ccTLDs registration per 100 inhabitants

Source

: OECD, based on Registries Monthly Reports. 

The main question to address here, however, is whether there are factors particular to the new gTLDs 

that may shed light on why they are more popular in some countries than others. One such factor might be 

the introduction of IDN (International Domain Name) scripts by Registries. Afilias, for example, 

announced in September 2003 that it would be the first generic top level domain (gTLD) registry to 

implement an ICANN standards compliant internationalised domain name (IDN) solution with the launch 

of its first IDN product for 

.info

. This included the opportunity to register 

.info

 names using the German 

script umlaut characters:  a,   o,  and    . There is perhaps, therefore, a ready reason that Switzerland, 

Germany, the Netherlands and Austria have the highest take up of 

.info

 names on a per capita basis. In 

these countries German is either one of the official languages or, in the case of the Netherlands, there are 

people with a high degree of fluency in German in some parts of the country. By early 2004, 

.info

contained over 400 000 live Web sites, of which 33% were operated by registrants from Germany.

19

Another factor in the take up of names across different countries may be related to the geographic location 

of registrars and their ability to market services to local users. A number of OECD countries do not have 

registrars, authorised to offer names such as 

.biz

 and 

.info

, located in their country. 

Impact of the introduction of new gTLDs 

One indicator which can be used to assess the impact of new gTLDs is the trends in registration 

following their introduction.  In total, the number of gTLDs has grown every year following the 

introduction of the new gTLDs (

Table 8

). On the other hand, there was a significant reduction in the 

number of registrations under the original gTLDs (

.com

, 

.org

, 

.net

) at the time of the introduction of the 

new gTLDs.  

 21