Local registry NIC ES spokesman José Alvarez contacted Domaines.Info to confirm the new milestone. "We now have 1,000,300 .ES domain names," he told us.
The Spanish naming authority wasn't expecting to pass the million domain mark so soon. Initial estimates were for the millionth .ES to be registered later in the year, possibly in September. But more open registration rules introduced for .ES in the wake of France's own liberalization of .FR have given the Spanish suffix a real boost and NIC ES had already revised their predictions earlier this year. "In December 2007 and January of this year, we registered more than 85,000 names," Alvarez told us last February.
IDNs at the fore
Part of Spain's domain expansion has been driven by IDN registrations. The registry claims to have 18,300 IDN domain names registered, or nearly 2% of the total .ES namespace. The ñ character is the most frequently registered and features in more than 10,000 of these IDNs.
