Re: [wg-c] .com vs. ccTLDs in Europe

[Annie Renard <Annie.Renard@nic.fr>]

 In your previous mail you wrote:

	 	Prodded by Tony off-line, I tried actually doing some research 
	on
	 the relative dominance of .com and the ccTLDs outside the US.  This is
	 an
	 area in which my lack of technical expertise is painfully obvious, so 
	I'm
	 posting what I think I learned to the list as a reality check.
	 <http://www.nic.fr/Statistiques/auto/Com/> appears to indicate that th
	ere
	 were 263,184 .com SLDs in Europe, and 37,403 .com SLDs in France, as o
	f
	 10/99.  <http://www.nic.fr/Statistiques/auto/Europe/> appears to indic
	ate
	 that there were 886,036 total SLDs in Europe as of 3/99, and
	 <http://www.nic.fr/Statistiques/fr.html> appears to indicate that ther
	e
	 were 44,386 domains in .fr as of 8/99.  This seems to me to indicate t
	hat
	 .com plays an important role in Europe, but not an overwhelming one.  
	Can
	 somebody please let me know if I'm understanding these statistics
	 incorrectly?
	 
Sorry, these statistics are obsolete. Don't worry about them.
We are going to update asap these informations.

The french companies buy .com domain names principally to protect 
their names.
It's impossible to compare the .com and the .fr mamagement, they are
very different approaches.

	- we are only Registry and we work with about 750 Registrars 
	- our naming policy is restrictive
	- we request some official document before registering a domain name
	- we protect the intellectual property
	- we manage some generic SLD matching the french administrative context
	- we don't take name reservations, the domain name must be running
	  and we provide a technical tool (ZoneCheck) to check the conformity
	  of the DNS configuration to the RFC. 
	- we provide a directory of the .fr zone, currently in french and 
	  english
	- we didn't have any conflict under .FR (no, we had "one" conflict)
	- from the beginning, we privilege  "quality of service" to the number
	  of domain names.
...

About european statistics, the latest authoritative informations in Europe 
are on the RIPE web site:
http://www.ripe.net/statistics/hostcount/

Top 10 of the european hostcounts for september:
_____________________-__________________________

	hostcount		SLD

.uk	1610806			249754			
.de	1567926			597486
.nl	 816723			 95878
.fr	 647166			 47376
.it	 554098			 73363
.se	 519642			 36430
.es	 514028			 17349
.fi	 471448			 12771
.no	 367492			 27477
.dk	 315763			 88158
...

----------------------------------------
RIPE zone: 9550014		1598807 

---
        Annie Renard    [nic@nic.fr]
        AFNIC/NIC France
	c/o INRIA domaine de Voluceau BP105, 78153 Le Chesnay CEDEX, France
	http://www.nic.fr/
	Personal Email: Annie.Renard@nic.fr