Recently, .net hit a major milestone when its zone surpassed 15 million .net domains registered globally, making it one of the most popular domain extensions on the Internet today. Supported by the same infrastructure and expertise that has powered .com for more than 15 years, .net is recognized around the world as an established and credible place to interact online. To mark this momentous occasion, we pulled together 15 facts about .net. How many .net facts do you already know?

15 Facts about .net:

Infographic on 15 Facts About .net to Celebrate 15 Million Registrations (Click to Enlarge)

1. Almost 139,000 domains registered in other top-level domains (TLDs) immediately forward to the same name, but as a .net site.
2. The first domain name to ever exist was a .net. While the first domain name to be registered was the now famous Symbolics.com, it is a lesser known fact that the very first domain name ever to exist was Nordu.net. Nordu.net was created by the registry with the same name as the first Internet rootserver (nic.nordu.net). Symbolics.com later went on to be the first domain name to go through the full registration process.
3. Due to its unique status .net is not among the six other original generic top-level-domains in RFC920, the document which outlines the original domain name conventions. It was still created on the same day as the others though—1/1/1985.
4. Today the .net zone sits at just over 15 million registered domains, roughly 10 times more than in the year 2000 when there were about 1.5 million registered.
5. The .net zone has doubled in size since 2006.
6. In 2012, the average character length of .net domain names created was 12 characters.
7. As social media grows in popularity, a trend of registering domain names and pointing them to social media accounts is emerging; most notably on Facebook. As of March 2013, 6,503 .net domain names pointed to Facebook. This is up from 5,039 in March 2012. That’s almost a 23% annual growth rate.
8. Approximately half of the 15 million .net domains registered today are registered within the United States.
9. .net domain names are hosted in more than 200 countries worldwide.
10. Almost half (48%) of the .net domains registered in India have e-Commerce functionality on their sites.
11. A single .net domain name can be registered in as many as 350 different native languages thanks to internationalized-domain-names (IDNs). IDNs make the Internet more globally accessible and functional by enabling domain names in non-ASCII characters.
12. Verisign applied for 3 transliterations of .net in Hangul, Simplified Chinese, and Devanagari last year through ICANN’s new gTLD program.
13. The percentage of the total base of .net domain names that are registered in Japan (2.51%) is almost twice that of the percentage of the total base of .com domains that are registered in Japan (1.43%).
14. DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) adds security to the DNS. Compared to .com, .net has almost double the percentage of DNSSEC enabled domains today.
15. Today, more than 99.9% of 6+ character .net domain names are available.

It is clear that .net is one of the most visible and venerable parts of the Internet domain space. As one of the world’s most reliable and established domains, businesses seeking to establish their online presence have relied on .net for more than two decades. To learn more about .net and see if the domain name you want is available, visit Verisigninc.com/dotnet.