On 5 November 2011, the German Top Level Domain .DE celebrated its 25th anniversary. It is the largest country code TLD with more than 14.6 million registered domains and about 3,000 new ones added daily. Furthermore it receives more than 7 billion name server queries per day. Dimensions that go beyond the imagination of even the most visionary Internet pioneer and that have fundamentally changed social and economic communication habits within only a quarter of a century. .DE has been elected by the Internet community as the TLD with the best brand image in 2010.

With more than 14.6 million registrations .DE currently has the most registrations in comparison with other country-specific top-level domains, followed by Great Britain (.UK) with around 9.7 million registered domains and the Netherlands (.NL) with 4.7 million registered domains. 25 years after the introduction of .DE, every sixth German has his own website under .DE. Furthermore, nearly 80 percent of all .DE domain holders are private persons.

.DE marked the emergence of the information technology 25 years ago in Germany on 5 November 1986 - when it was registered in the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) database. With this entry, domains with the country code for Germany were permitted to be registered for the first time in history. Nowadays every second about 100,000 times an Internet address ending with .DE is called up from somewhere in the world. 

During the first ten years, administration and DNS service for .DE were provided by universities. Only in 1988, a German institution, the University of Dortmund, took over administration and care of the first six .DE domains (dbp.de, rmi.de, telenet.de, uka.de, uni-dortmund.de and uni-paderborn.de). In 1993, a foundation was established through the initiative of the then three German Internet Service Providers, the "Interessenverbund Deutsches Network Information Center (IV-DENIC)" to put out to tender the operation of the nationwide name server service. By 1994 the domain inventory had increased to about 1,000 domains and the tasks of the Deutsches Network Information Center (DENIC) were transferred to the data center of Karlsruhe. The number of domains reached 20,000 in 1996. DENIC also was the first country code registry that started to run its name server network completely independently in 2003. And in 2004, the Cooperative was one of the first TLDs that included IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) in their character set permitted for domain names.

By 2011 more than 200,000 second level domains under .DE are currently signed, the most renowned of them is paypal.de. According to a McKinsey study published in May 2011, the Internet sector as a key industry generates 3.2 percent of the German gross domestic product and thus – not only due to a growth rate of 24 percent in the last five years – has become a more important economic factor than the energy industry or agriculture. Even after 25 years .DE is and remains a critical element of this success.

Register your .DE with EuroDNS here!