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A double anniversary
On 5 November 2026, the country code .de celebrated its 40th anniversary. For SerNet, this marks a double celebration: just over 30 years ago, on 24 October 1996, we registered our own domain, sernet.de. It has therefore been part of three-quarters of .de’s history.
How .de began
On 5 November 1986, the first .de domain was entered into the database. The top-level domain was initially managed from the USA, then from 1988 onwards by the University of Dortmund – using a manually maintained list of just six domains. In 1994, the University of Karlsruhe took over operations; at that time, there were around 1,000 .de domains. Things then moved quickly: by mid-1996, there were already around 20,000. In December 1996, 37 German internet service providers founded the DENIC eG cooperative, which continues to manage .de to this day.
24 October 1996: An email from the Göttingen Observatory
On Thursday, 24 October 1996, at 5.16 pm, Johannes Loxen sent a short email to the registry at the time. He was still working at the Göttingen University Observatory at the time and wrote the email using the ‘elm’ email programme running on HP-UX:
Dear Sir or Madam!
I hereby wish to register the domain ‘SerNet.DE’ for reservation.
Umlauts were not yet commonplace in emails back then. At that time, there were approximately 35,000 .DE domains. DENIC eG was not founded until two months later.
From customer to registrar
In 1996, SerNet was itself still a customer of the registry. Since 2001, we have been a member of DENIC eG and register .de domains directly for our customers. We operate the DNS servers for this ourselves – a crucial component for an IT security service provider, as without a reliable DNS, nothing works on the internet.
The six domains registered in 1988 have grown to over 18 million today. The 100,000 mark was reached in December 1997, the first million in 1999, and ten million in 2006. In June 2026, DENIC registered the 18-millionth .de domain. Statistically, this means that almost one in six people in Germany holds a .de domain.
Congratulations, .de!
We congratulate DENIC and everyone who has helped make .de the world’s most important country code top-level domain over the past four decades. We are proud to have been part of this journey for 30 years – and look forward to the decades to come.
