The United States Still Dominates the Internet, Ipwalk Reports

By Derek Iwasiuk
DomainInformer.com
August 24, 2006

In a recent report, Internet research company Ipwalk announced that two-thirds of all domain names are hosted in the United States.

There are currently more than 77 million generic top-level domain (gTLD) names in the world (counting .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz domain names). 67.23 percent of these are hosted in the United States, which corresponds to 52,277,677 domain names, making it by far the most dominant country on the Internet. The United States has almost twelve times as many domain names as Germany in second place.

According to the Internet statistics firm, a contributing factor to the strong US dominance could be that the country's web hosting industry is both market leading and very competitive on price, with the result that a large number of foreign companies and persons have chosen the United States for their Internet presence.

The top five countries together hold 83.14 percent of all gTLD domain names, Ipwalk says. These countries are the United States, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and China.

With such a strong and established web hosting industry, the United States will continue to dominate the Internet for the foreseeable future, though up-and-coming IT superpowers such as China are bound to start catching up as their infrastructure improves.