DENIC eG is the manager of the

.de .de is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Federal Republic of Germany. DENIC (the Network Information Centre responsible for .de domains) does not require specific second-level domains, and there are no official ccSLDs under .d ...

domain, the

country-code Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The term ' ...

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

for Germany. It was founded in 1996 and is organised as a non-regulated not-for-profit

cooperative A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-contro ...

. DENIC provides the

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned t ...

(DNS) as well as registration and management services for .de and

ENUM Telephone number mapping is a system of unifying the international telephone number system of the public switched telephone network with the Internet addressing and identification name spaces. Internationally, telephone numbers are systematica ...

. Besides the

whois WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase "who is") is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomou ...

lookup service for .de domains, its portfolio further includes DNS

anycast Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination IP address is shared by devices (generally servers) in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sen ...

services for registries and data escrow services for both registries and registrars of the domain industry. The DENIC Cooperative has more than 300 members, 25 percent of them based in other countries than Germany. .de domains can be registered by any individual or

legal entity In law, a legal person is any person or 'thing' (less ambiguously, any legal entity) that can do the things a human person is usually able to do in law – such as enter into contracts, sue and be sued, own property, and so on. The reason for ...

worldwide. Next to managing the German namespace on the Internet, DENIC is actively involved in national and international bodies coordinating the Internet ecosystem. Rüdiger Volk at the University of Dortmund started to administer the .de domain in 1988, and introduced the name "de-NIC".About DENIC. How it all Started: The Birth of .de and the Founding of the Cooperative
denic, accessed: 2020-12-06.

References

External links

DENIC.de
Domain name registries Cooperatives in Germany {{ict-company-stub