DSTI/ICCP/TISP(2004)2/FINAL 

include unique websites as well as those of speculators and traffic aggregators. There also appears to be a 

significant proportion of names that are either used for purposes other than the World Wide Web 

(

e.g.

 e mail), defensive registrations or those that are simply not used. 

Cyveillance undertakes surveys by crawling more than 40 million registered domain names to 

determine the proportion that are in use on the World Wide Web. The survey splits the results into three 

categories of domain names. Where a registered domain is an accessible site, with unique content, they are 

counted as live domains. Parked domains consist of a placeholder page usually provided by a registrar 

while domains that generate an error message are counted under a third category. In March 2003 the 

traditional domains (

.com

, 

.net

 and 

.org

) recorded the highest proportion of live domains (Table 15). 

The 

.biz

 and 

.info 

domains

had significantly more parked pages. The latter two domains also had a higher 

proportion of redirects to sites under other domain names. 

Table 15.   Registered domains in use, (March 2003) 

 Live 

Parked 

Error  

Proportion of live domains which redirect to 

(%) 

(%) 

(%) 

other sites (%) (October 2003) 

.com 

54.1 11.8 34.1 

11.4 

.org 51.3 

8.4 

40.3 

11.0 

.net 46.9 

9.1 

44.0 

13.0 

.info 

39.8 19.5 40.6 

13.6 

ccTLDs 39.2 8.4 

52.4 

.. 

.biz 

36.6 19.7 43.6 

14.3 

.name 26.5 

0.2 

73.3 

.. 

Source

: Cyveillance (www.cyveillance.com). 

One further consideration in respect to the geographical location of registration deserves to be noted. 

New gTLDs, as has been discussed earlier, are more popular in some countries than others. Where this is 

the result of a new service associated with that gTLD, such as with international domain names, there is 

clearly a benefit produced by meeting previously unmet demand. In these cases if business users need to 

register names under new domains the benefits may well outweigh the costs, in terms of reaching new 

markets or better serving customers. At the same time additional domains may allow separate businesses 

with equally valid claims to a particular name to register names. This latter point can be related to 

geography in that business users in some countries may have joined the Internet well in advance of 

businesses in another country. Afilias, for example, report that the largest share of registrations under 

.info 

are made from Europe. As other countries develop greater Internet access, and new international domain 

name character recognition further develops, increasing demand for new gTLDs might be expected. 

 31