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Three characters marked the emergence of the information society in Germany 25 years ago: About 100,000 times per second an Internet address ending with .de is called up from somewhere in the world. Today, there are more than 14.6 million such addresses, and about 3,000 new ones are added every 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.

The first step towards this evolution was made on 5 November 1986, when the country code .de was included in the official list of IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the organization responsible for the global coordination of the central functions of the Internet. With this entry, domains with the country code for Germany were permitted to be registered for the first time in history.

The organization behind .de is DENIC eG (Deutsches Network Information Center), a neutral service provider founded in 1996. Organized as a German cooperative, DENIC unites 280 German and international (about 17 percent) companies of the Internet industry. Besides its function as the central registry of .de domains, DENIC also is responsible for the troublefree operation of the technical infrastructure of .de and has thus been an essential pillar of the German Internet for 15 years.

For further details please refer to our official press release.