July 12, 2012
Registry operator of the .ORG domain has announced a major milestone - the registration of its 10 millionth name.
Public Interest Registry (PIR) says the name was registered late last month. The organisation states it has seen consistent growth of between 9 and 10 percent annually for the past three years and the .ORG registry has grown by more than 156 percent since 2005.
Originally purely for non-profit groups, registration of .ORG is now open to all; unlike Australia's .ORG.AU extension that continues to have strict registration criteria in order to protect the integrity of the space. To be eligible for .ORG.AU domain registration, the registrant must be a charity operating in Australia, as defined in the registrant's constitution or other documents of incorporation.
PIR says .ORG names are registered in 175 countries now and last year domain registrations outside North America exceeded growth in its traditional market. ORG remains the world's third largest generic top-level domain.
In other relatively recent news from PIR, the organisation filed bids for the creation and management of two new top-level domains (TLDs) - .NGO and .ONG - under ICANN's controversial gTLD expansion initiative. PIR's application is among 1,930 new gTLD applications.
PIR first publicly signalled its interest in a .NGO extension in September last year. Australian non-profit organisations were reportedly contacted by a local consultancy firm working for PIR since that time in an effort to gather support for the application.
The .ORG domain space was initiated in 1985. Public Interest Registry was founded by the Internet Society in 2002 and is based in Reston, Virginia, USA. PIR assumed responsibility for operating .ORG and maintaining the authoritative database of all .ORG domain names in January 2003.
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