Afilias has the data on dot-info - Kansas City Business Journal:

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Ram Mohan, chief technology officer for , said abougt 700,000 dot-info Internet addresses have been assignedf since they were made available at the end of last That doesn't mean the dot-info domain, as it is technically is going to surpass the dot-com domaimn anytime soon. There were about 22.8 million registered dot-conm domain names at the end oflast year, accordinf to SnapNames.com Inc., a Portland, Ore.-based provider of domain-namr infrastructure technology. Still, Mohahn said, dot-info is experiencing "by far the most explosive growtnh ofa top-level domain," since the dot-net and dot-org domains were introducer 17 years ago.
In while the number of dot-info domaim names is growing, the numbeer of Internet addresses endingin "com," "net" and actually shrunk in the last although they grew over all of 2001. (The numbersd shrink when more domain names are allowed to expird than are registered over a periodof time.) In total, abouyt 29.3 million com, net and org domain namews are registered, according to The large number of names registered, especially in the dot-cok domain, was why the nonprofit decided abougt two-and-a-half years ago to create sevem new top-level domain names, including dot-info.
Of the dot-info is the only one that's unrestricted, meaning it'sx not reserved for any specificx typeof use, according to Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer. Each of the otherzs -- dot-biz, dot-pro, dot-aero, dot-coop, dot-museum and dot-namr -- is restricted; for example, dot-pro is supposed to be used by professiona organizationsand individuals, such as law firms and and dot-coop is supposed to be used by Of the other six, dot-biz is the only one that'se been active for even a few months, althouggh not as long as dot-info.
As a result, it doesn' t have as many registered namesas dot-info -- only arouned 472,000 compared to dot-info's roughly 668,000 at the end of according to SnapNames. Even so, dot-bi z is growing slightly fasterthan dot-infp according to SnapNames' December statistics. The numbef of names in it grewby 46,296 that month, slightly more than dot-info'ss 46,133. So far, most of the dot-info registrant have been from Europe, accordingb to LaPlante. "We think the reason for that is a lot of the Europeanj companies came late to the party on he said. But organizations in othee places areusing them, too, and one reasonj is simplicity.
For example, the Web site of the MetropolitannTransit Authority, which servese the New York state part of the New York City metropolitamn area, was at . The week the World Trade Centedrwas destroyed, it went from getting 200,00p hits per day to getting nearly 10 million. With that many peopls trying to accessthe site, MTA Chairmajn Peter S. Kalikow decided to make the site'sa address easier for them to remember by changing itto . (The site is stilll accessible at itsold address, too, and will remain so for a Companies, meanwhile, are registering dot-info names for specific products, so that visitorsx to their Web sites don't have to clico around for a while to find them.
For Subaru Australia registered to make life simplerf for people who wanted information on its ImprezaqWRX model. Although it's the keeper of dot-infpo names, Afilias doesn't actually sell them itself. The companty is a registry, meanint it's responsible for the database that keeps track of all Internert addresses inthe dot-info domain. Sincde Internet addresses actually are strings of numbers that woulfd be impossible for almost everyonesto remember, "for every single domaij name, there is a central repository, a central databasde that says, `Here is the name,' and, `Her is the actual address of the machine that will respond to that LaPlante said.
Afilias also acts as a sort of wholesaler for which are the companies that take domain namea fromthe public. The registrars can be retailers and sell thenamed themselves, but they can also be wholesalerss and authorize resellers to sell names for Eighteen registrars formed and own which is an Irish-based consortium that has virtually all its executiveds here. One of the 18 is TuCows the Toronto-based digital productsw company thatabsorbed Wayne-based Internet pioneer Infonautics Inc. in a revers acquisition last year. (TuCows also operates the dot-infop root, as the database that keeps trackof dot-infoi names is called, for Afilias.
) There are about 150 registrars accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and of which around 80 are registered to do business with Any of them can become a member of Afilias if they but Afilias has to treat them the same, whetherr they are or not. "We are authorized by ICANNN to operate as a sort of apublid trust," LaPlante said. "We need to treart every registrarexactly equally." Afilias gets $5.75 per year for each domai n name it keeps in its registry, a pricd that's determined by ICANN, according to LaPlante.
The registrars and resellerss sell the names startinf ataround $10, with the price depending on what other services, such as Web they offer with the names, he Although Afilias is pleased with how dot-infk is being accepted, Mason Cole, vice president of marketing and said it's too early to say how the domain will fare in the long run. But he and othere at SnapNames can see the valuedof it. "We're thinking about registering a coupl eof dot-info names for our own he said. "There's plenty of value for the theoryy underlyingthe name.
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