The non-profit company Nominet, which is the registry of the UK’s ccTLD .UK, has presented a world map that could shock a person with only the faintest understanding of geography. The size of countries on this map directly depends on the number of names registered in the ccTLDs of these countries. The map looks outlandish: dwarved Africa, disproportionately inflated Europe with a giant Germany in the center and, of course, the main world power – the Pacific island of Tokelau, which surpasses both Americas in area.
The map is accompanied by statistics and an overview of last year’s trends, developed by Nominet experts. It states an already known fact: the COVID-19 pandemic and the related lockdown restrictions have become a powerful impetus for the growth of registrations in ccTLDs. Twenty-five domain zones of European countries that are members of the CENTR saw a 20-percent increase in April last year compared to the same month of 2019, according to Online Domain. And in Germany’s ccTLD .DE, the number of registered names went up by 31,274 during April, while the growth in April 2019 was only 13,017.
Laos is worth noting among other countries whose area on the map has significantly increased over the past year. The number of registrations in the ccTLD .LA grew by 341 percent at once. The surge is largely due to the fact that the domain is actively used in the United States, since LA is an abbreviation for one of the largest and most popular cities in the country – Los Angeles. In general, according to Nominet’s statistics, the share of ccTLDs accounts for about 33 percent of the total number of existing domain names. As for the remaining 67 percent, almost half of them (47percent, to be precise) are in .COM. Nominet’s map and statistics are available here.
