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There are now more than 138 million domain names registered worldwide, according to the new Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF) by VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN). This is a 31% increase over the same quarter in 2006. Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) grew to about 51.5 million, 36% more than the same quarter last year. The number of new domain name registrations hit an all-time high in the second quarter of 2007 with 14.5 million new registrations.

From VeriSign’s press release:

Not surprisingly, as domain name registrations increased, so have the demands on the registry infrastructures that enable users to register domain names, access Web sites, send emails or conduct commerce and communications. VeriSign’s registry infrastructure continued to experience heavy demand, processing a peak of 30 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day in the second quarter. The VeriSign DNS continued to maintain operational accuracy and stability for 100 percent of the time as it has for the past nine years. As part of its commitment to continually strengthen its infrastructure, VeriSign in February announced Project Titan, a major initiative to expand and diversify the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year 2010.

“As the Internet grows and becomes more global, so does the challenge to ensure that businesses and Internet users throughout the world can rely upon it,” said Raynor Dahlquist, vice president of Naming Services at VeriSign. “VeriSign is focused on ensuring that as the Internet develops, it remains accessible and operational around the world.”

William Tan, who is senior software engineer at NeuStar and operator of IDNSearch.net, wrote on CircleID that ICANN had been testing IDN top-level domains. Tan says he found out from ICANN’s IDN Program Director Tina Dam that ICANN was doing a live IDN TLD test. As part of the test, ICANN translated the domain extension .test into eleven languages and ten scripts.

ICANN published the following annoucement on its website:

ICANN today finalized the IDN .test Evaluation Plan and continued taking steps toward insertion of IDN strings in the root zone. Recent changes to the plan are based on comments received on the IDN public forum and also from consultations with ICANN Technical Advisory Committees. This last version was approved by the ICANN Board at their 14 August 2007 meeting. The resolution directs ICANN Staff to implement the IDN .test Evaluation Plan, and report back to the ICANN Board following the conclusion of the evaluation.

Specifically, the Board approved the delegation of eleven evaluative top-level domains representing the term ‘test’ translated into: Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. Following this ICANN Board approval, the delegation request will now go through standard IANA procedures for insertion of top-level domains into the root zone. The technical evaluations of IDN TLDs and their usability in various applications will proceed following their delegation.

This is a major milestone in the IDN Program Plan and signals a significant step forward towards Internationalization of the DNS. It is currently anticipated that delegation of these TLDs and the evaluations, as described in the plan, will commence in September 2007. More information about this project will be made available at http://icann.org/topics/idn. If you have any questions about ICANN’s IDN Program please contact Tina Dam, IDN Program Director at tina.dam@icann.org.