Dot Com Press<br>Domains by the numbers<br>July 31, 2026Visit the archive to read past emails and sign up for future ones ahead of the dot com et al book launch.<br>Domain names are words that stand for numbers (IP addresses). We just crossed 400 million domains registered globally, so I decided to write some words about that number—and other numbers.

$0

The initial cost to register a domain in 1993.

Domain registration was free when it first opened to the public in the early nineties. The internet will probably be pretty niche, anyway, right? A journalist for WIRED, Joshua Quittner, registered mcdonalds.com in 1994, before which a McDonald’s PR person asked him, “Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?”

$0.20

ICANN’s transaction fee paid by registrars when a domain is registered, renewed, or transferred.

Only a couple dimes, sure, but if you take this number and multiply it by that other number—400 million domains registered—you get $80 million in transaction fees ICANN collects each year. ICANN is a fairly large organization—about 450 employees—representing the much larger internet community. They pay for three free-to-attend conferences each year to convene thousands of people from that community. ICANN has its critics, but for my part, the many people I’ve met who work for ICANN are competent, kind, and care about the internet.

The number of characters in a ccTLD.

Any top-level domain you come across with two letters belongs to a country. So for example .ai, .io, and .co belong to Anguilla, the British Indian Ocean Territory, and Colombia, respectively. Those are called country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs, and there are 316 of them. This is where geopolitics and the internet often intersect, like when Yugoslavia’s .yu went dark, or when Afghanistan shut down queer.af.

10

The maximum number of years for which you can register a domain.

Owning your own domain is about the closest you can get to ownership on the internet (much more control than a social media account, say). But the 10-year maximum renewal period is a reminder that it’s the registry that ultimately owns your domain. They can raise prices or change policy, and what happens to your domain when you die?

$10.26

The wholesale price Verisign charges for .com domains.

On November 1, this will go up to $10.97. Verisign has a contract with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (the NTIA, technically) that allows them to raise .com prices by up to 7% for the last four years of the six-year contract.

13

The number of DNS root servers.

There’s a set of root servers around the world whose primary job is to store domain-IP pairs1. There are only 13 such servers. Technically, it’s 13 IP addresses shared by about two thousand actual servers around the world. 12 organizations run those 13 root servers, and it’s sort of an odd bunch. Verisign runs several dozen—ok, makes sense—, ICANN controls a bunch—yeah—, NASA operates a few hundred—sure—, and—wait a minute—the University of Maryland? UMD runs 225 root nameservers all over the world, more than 10% of all root servers. The US has the most total root servers within its borders at 400ish. China has less than one hundred. Iceland has six. As with any resource, the Internet is not evenly distributed.

47%

The percentage of Anguilla’s revenue from .ai domain sales in 2025.

Anguilla is the A-Island. They’re using .ai proceeds to fund infrastructure, like schools, roads, and airports. Hypothetically, Anguilla could even fund a Universal Basic Income of ~$2-5k per citizen (kind of like Alaska’s oil-funded dividend). They used to have the actual servers on the island, but now Identity Digital runs the registry backend.

63

The maximum length of a domain label.

A domain name’s label—i.e. the part before the dot—can be no longer than 63 characters. In the case of subdomains, you could have more than one label—e.g. one.two.three.com—totaling no more than 255 characters. This is per RFC 1035, written by DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris in 1987. To illustrate that 63 characters is Quite Long Enough, consider for example the 60-character title of one of my favorite essays, recast as a domain name: getting-away-from-pretty-much-already-being-away-from-it-all.com

277

The number of top-level domains owned by Identity Digital.

Identity Digital, formerly Donuts, raised $100 million to apply for hundreds of top-level domains in 2012. In the years since, they’ve bought up other registries to grow their portfolio, which includes the TLDs .email, .lgbt, .studio, and .wtf. I even own some of their domains, like weeksofyour.life. Other notable registries include Google with 46 TLDs; Amazon with 51; and XYZ with 35.

920

The RFC that established the initial set of top-level domains.

In 1984 Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds wrote RFC 920, “Domain Requirements,” defining the first TLDs: .com , .org, .gov, .edu, and .mil. While .gov, .edu, and .mil are still semantically enforced, .com is by now totally...