35 years of the German internet

Since 1996, the organisation DENIC eG (German Network Information Centre) in Frankfurt has been responsible, as the central registry, for the allocation of German domain names. The registered co-operative was founded by 37 German internet service providers.

From around the year 2000, the internet grew at a rapid pace. Although this growth has levelled off somewhat, DENIC still records an increase of around 30,000 new .de domains every month. Globally, the German domain is one of the most widely used country-code top-level domains, and in July 2021 the 17-million mark for German domains was surpassed for the first time.

What began 35 years ago as a small project in Dortmund has thus become one of the world’s most attractive internet domain extensions. The alumni of the Department of Computer Science at TU Dortmund University will be celebrating this milestone anniversary at a special event on 5 November 2021, starting at 3.30 pm. The event will highlight the outstanding role played by Dortmund’s computer science department in the development of the internet in Germany. Numerous speakers and presenters are expected to attend, including Daniel Karrenberg, one of the few Germans to have been inducted into the ‘Internet Hall of Fame’.

There has been a close collaboration between the university and Materna for decades. This collaboration has its origins in the two founders of Materna, who worked at the university in the early 1980s before setting up their own company, also in Dortmund.