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Domain name registrations dropped for the first time in the history of the Internet during the fourth quarter of last year. Combined with high-profile dot-com failures, telephone company troubles and widespread layoffs, the domain name data prompted some analysts and media outlets to proclaim: "The Internet is shrinking!"
It's a great headline, but the "incredible, shrinking Internet is a myth. By every measure of a network's health - users, connected systems,traffic and applications - the Internet continues to expand at an unprecedented rate.And corporate usage is prompting most of that growth.
"Corporate Internet traffic is not only growing, but growing exponentially," says Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, a Canadian domain name registrar.'As we continue to move toward multimedia ... we're talking about continued exponential growth."
Despite the worst economic downturn in a decade, Internet growth during 2001 was strong in all areas:
* The number of host computers connected to the Internet topped 137 million, up 40% over the 97 million recorded in December 2000.
* Traffic on the U.S. portion of the Internet's backbone surpassed 55 petabytes per month, more than double the 23 petabytes recorded in January 2001. (One petabyte equals 20 million four-- drawer filing cabinets full of text.)
* The number of documents accessible over the Web doubled during the past 18 months, surpassing 3 billion.
* The number of U.S. adults connected to the Internet rose 5%, with 62% now connecting to the Internet at least three times in the past three months.
Internet experts see no end in sight to the network-of-networks' sprawl, especially in light of the new mobile devices hitting the market and the increasing popularity of broadband services.
All I see is continuous, smooth growth," says Aristotle Balogh,vice president of engineering at VeriSign Global Registry Services, which handles all the look-ups for the .com, .net and .org domains. VeriSign saw its average daily traffic hit 4.6 billion queries in the third quarter of 2001, more than twice the 2.1 billion queries seen a year earlier.
"As more [handhelds] that can access the Internet are available, it's conceivable that the...