About .net

Currently (as of January 2005) there are more than 5.2 million .net domain names registered. This makes .net the second largest generic top level domain (TLD), behind .com, and the third largest of all TLDs.

The .net top level domain is crucial for the operation of the overall Internet. This is because many devices that are responsible for the infrastructure of the Internet have names under the .net TLD.

Amazon.com, Microsoft.com, and Walmart.com, for examples, rely upon name servers in the .net domain to resolve their web and email servers (i.e. the DNS lookup for these websites is handled via a .net server). In fact, a significant number of .com domains, including 37 of the top 100 sites, rely upon .net domains as part of their infrastructure.

According to VeriSign, .net represents 30 percent of the name servers worldwide. It is estimated that more than 155 billion e-mails are delivered via .net infrastructure every day, and roughly 30 percent of global e-Commerce.

This imposes a great deal of responsibility on the operator of the .net registry. The stable and secure operation of the .net infrastructure is of utmost importance, not only for the .net TLD itself, but for many other parts of the Internet. Therefore, the operator of the registry must not only meet the technical pre-requisites, but must also have substantial experience in the area that evidently shows that he is able to provide stable and high performance registry services.

Additionally, the Whois servers and TLD name servers are highly attractive to any kind of hackers. To operate these servers is a challenge which can only be fulfilled by experienced companies in this field.