Prague, 10 January 2013 – On Sunday, 13 January 2013, it will be exactly 20 years since the family of top-level national domains was extended by the .CZ suffix. It was established as a replacement for the .CS domain, which had been in operation from 1991 and expired with the split-up of former Czechoslovakia. According to the statistics of the CZ.NIC Association, the administrator of the Czech domain since 1999, there are over 1,012,000 registered Internet addresses ending in .CZ today.

“.CZ is by far the most widely used top-level domain in the Czech Republic. This is primarily the result of two breakthrough developments, the first being the relaxation of rather strict registration rules in 1997. After this decision, domains could also be registered by individuals. Ten years later, CZ.NIC deployed FRED, its own system for domain administration and registration, which has made the registration process much faster and cheaper. Since then, there have been about 10,000 new domains registered every month,” says Ondřej Filip, Executive Director of the CZ.NIC Association.

According to the latest comprehensive statistics available to the CZ.NIC Association, the share of domains held by individuals is gradually increasing, today accounting for 58% of all .CZ domains. Most holders own only one domain; the largest number of .CZ domains registered to one holder is 4,054.In terms of regional distribution, the most holders are from Central Bohemia, the least from the Karlovy Vary region.

A content analysis of 1,200 randomly selected websites in the .CZ domain showed that the greatest number of sites are company websites (41 percent), followed by parked domains (19 percent), e-shops and idle domains (8 percent). Seven percent of domains are private websites.

About Association

CZ.NIC, z. s. p. o., is an interest association of legal entities, founded in 1998 by leading providers of Internet services. The association currently has 106 members. The key activities of the association include operation of the domain name registry for the .CZ domain and the 0.2.4.e164.arpa (ENUM) domain, operation of the CZ top-level domain and public education in the area of domain names. The association is now intensively working on development of the DNSSEC technology and mojeID service, extension and improvements of the domain administration system and support of new technologies and projects beneficial to the Internet infrastructure in the Czech Republic. CZ.NIC is a member of international organizations uniting similar organizations around the world (CENTR, ccNSO and more) and a member of the EURid association, managing the European domain .EU. More information about CZ.NIC can be found at www.nic.cz.