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

[Jim Dixon <jdd@matthew.uk1.vbc.net>]

On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Mark Henderson-Thynne wrote:

> >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?
> 
> Yes, I am, we have a complete database of all InterNIC domains. And out

Hmmm.  I say ".COM".  You say, "all InterNIC domains".  Is it possible
to give us your figure for .COM?

To make sentences shorter I have also sometimes referred to North 
America, sometimes the US and Canada, and sometimes the US.  Tony R's
figures were something like 94% US and 3% Canadian, as I recall.

> >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.
> 
> 1000 domains out of 1.6 million isnt a very accurate sample. Our search covered 

OK.  I looked back at what we got and found that 

*	total sample size was 1340
*	1094 were US (81.6%)
*	  76 were CA ( 5.7%)
*	   3 were CH ( 0.22%)

We didn't look at all InterNIC domains, just .COM, which is what the
discussion is about at the moment.  The focus of the discussion with
Tony was whether 17% of .COM registrations were in the European
Union; Tony disagreed and our figures supported his contention.

The only countries with significant numbers of entries other than the 
above were:

*	23 in DE
*	10 in DK
*	11 in FR
*	11 in SE
*	27 in UK 

Only Germany and the UK were over the 1% level in .com entries; only the 
UK was over 2% (barely).

> all 1.6 million domains and our figures are correct.

We aren't looking at precisely the same thing and the methodology is
a little soft, as we found when we began looking at the data in detail.

In any case, the figures make it clear that the US has an overwhelming
interest in .COM, with Canada a distant second.

> I would provide the proof as an attachment but the data file is 291mb long ;-)

If you are willing to share the data, we would be interested.  We have 
lots of free disk space in Telehouse and ample bandwidth to your ISP.

--
Jim Dixon                                                 Managing Director
VBCnet GB Ltd                http://www.vbc.net        tel +44 117 929 1316
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