Re: "97% or so of .COM registrants are Americans." WRONG!

[Ivan Pope <ivan@netnames.com>]

>On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Mark Henderson-Thynne wrote:
>
>> >As I said earlier it is a waste of time to talk about the motives of the
>> >IAHC in placing CORE in Geneva.  It is much more meaningful to talk about
>> >the practical effect: 97% or so of .COM registrants are Americans.
>
>Mark, are you disputing this figure?
>
>> InterNIC Total		1,666,550	(72%)
>>
>> (out of these approx 69.4% are registered to US addresses)
>
>Some time ago I said on this list (quoting someone at the European
>Commission) that 17% of registrations in .com were in Europe.  Tony
>Rutkowski disagreed, saying that US registrations were something
>like 97%.  We dumped a random sample of 1000 domains from the .com
>zone file and found that Tony's figures were more or less correct.
>That is, nearly all .COM registrations are in the US and Canada.

Jim,
Rather than a straw poll on some .coms, we actually analyse _all_ the
domains in the world. As Mark says, over 30% of .coms are registered to
non-US addresses, so he is disputing the 99% figure. And he does it on
totally accurate and up to date information.
If you add in the rest of the worlds Domain Names, US registrations are in
a minority. Which sort of adds some weight to the proposal to move to
Geneva.
Ivan

Ivan Pope ivan@netnames.co.uk
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