德国域名.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, as it is the case with the .uk domain
range for example.
The name is based on the first two letters of the German name
for Germany (Deutschland). Prior to 1989, East Germany had a
separate ISO 3166-1 code (dd) but it was never assigned its own
ccTLD; de is the only German ccTLD that ever existed.
In Spanish, French, Romanian and Portuguese "de" is the genitive
form (like "of" in English), so there are a lot of
Latin-speakers hosters that offer customized sites like
elforo.de or elblog.de , putting your name after it .
.de is currently the most popular ccTLD in terms of number of
registrations, and is second after .com among all TLDs..
The first point of registration for .de domains was at the
Dortmund University Department of Computer Science. unido.de was
the first registered .de-domain
.de registrations may be directly ordered from DENIC but it is
faster and cheaper to do so via a DENIC member .
The domain name must have at least 3 letters, not only numbers
and may not be a German license plate code. The only current
known exceptions are db.de (Deutsche Bahn), ix.de and hq.de
which have only 2 letters.
Registrations of internationalized domain names are also
accepted .
