.NET Zone Drops below 15 Million

14,976,876 .NET Domains

[accurate]

The .NET Zone File has dropped below 15 million registered domain names.

According to Verisign as of today the current total is 14,976,876 .NET domains in the zone file. There are 14,740,217 active domain names.

Why do you think .NET domains are dropping? Anything to do with new gTLDs and ccTLDs?

What do you think this means for the future of .NET?

[brotherhood of LAN]

.io domains must have surely played their part, they're quite popular with what've had been traditionally a .net like domain name.

[jmccormac]

The zone count for .NET has been below 15M for some months. It was the Chinese bubble that boosted its numbers. It has always been seen as an alternative to .COM and a "must register" domain name for registrants registering their .COM domain name. The .IO ccTLD is irrelevant in this case and most of the ccTLD is largely irrelevant to the performance of gTLDs. The fact that most mature markets will move registration activity to their local ccTLD and away from the .COM and NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO means that the non-core gTLDs have been taking a considerable beating over the past five years or so at a country market level.

Regards...jmcc

[tangor]

Improvements in protecting trademarks etc at the domain level has also had an impact ... many are not taking both com and net as they can use/take over any domain that infringes if necessary.

[Jori]

A lot of .net were used for spam, maybe the dropping of those top domains is related?