.de is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Federal Republic of Germany. DENIC (the Network Information Centreresponsible for .de domains) does not require specific second-level domains, as it is the case with the .uk domain range for example.
The name is based on the first two letters of the German name for Germany (Deutschland). Prior to 1989, East Germany had a separate ISO 3166-1 code (dd) but it was never assigned its own ccTLD; de is the only German ccTLD that ever existed.
.de is currently the second most popular ccTLD in terms of number of registrations, after .cn, and is third after .com and .cn among all TLDs.
The first point of registration for .de domains was at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Dortmund. uni-dortmund.de was among the first registered .de-domains.
.de registrations may be directly ordered from DENIC but it is faster and cheaper to do so via a DENIC member (registrar).
The domain name must have at least 3 letters and may not be exclusively composed of numbers. The only current known exceptions are db.de (Deutsche Bahn), ix.de , and hq.de which were registered before the three letter rule was adopted.
Registrations of internationalized domain names are also accepted so that all diacritics of German may be used.
In many romanic languages, e.g., Spanish, French, Romanian and Portuguese, “de” expresses the genitiveof a noun (like “of” in English). This is exploited in domain registrations under the German TLD for romance language webhoststhat offer customized sites, like elforo.de (theforum.of), cleverly encoding the site name into the URLpath, such as elforo.de/wikipedia, meaning theforum.of/wikipedia.
.de Domain Names are available for registration or transfer from:
| Introduced | 1986 |
|---|---|
| TLDtype | Country code top-level domain |
| Status | Active |
| Registry | DENIC |
| Sponsor | DENIC eG |
| Intended use | Entities connected with Germany |
| Actual use | Very popular in Germany |
| Registration restrictions | Must have administrative contact resident in Germany |
| Structure | May register at second level |
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