After recording its highest growth figures ever in 2011, .nl's rate of expansion slowed in 2012. Net growth in the number of domain names was 6.6 per cent: a little less than half of the 14 per cent growth recorded in 2011.
The number of new registrations actually held up well, but the number of cancellations was a lot higher. The economic circumstances certainly played a major role, as did the fact that the income from domain tradingdeclined, prompting companies to look more critically at their domain name portfolios.
Other country-code domains also had a disappointing 2012. Growth in .de (Germany) was down 77 per cent and .uk (United Kingdom) was down 54 per cent. Despite growing more slowly than in previous years, .nl's share of the Dutch market rose, to stand at 72.9 per cent by the end 2012.The global DNS – the system used on the internet to translate domain names into IP addresses and vice versa – is very robust, but has certain vulnerabilities. DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) is an extension to the DNS, which enables internet users to verify that an incoming response to a DNS query is authentic and comes from the right party. The extension provides valuable protection against cache poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks. It also facilitates the use of other techniques that make the internet more secure, such as DANE and DKIM.