The current number of registered domain names on the internet has exceeded 180 million globally – the number of registered internet domain names increased 12 percent, surging the global total to 183 million, in the first quarter of 2009 — says a recent report released by the Mountain View, California based internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign.

The report articulates that the number of registered internet domain names rose 3 percent over the fourth quarter of 2008, and surged 12 percent over the first quarter of 2008. On March 31, 2009, the India’s share in the total number of 183 million domain names was 1.4 million, which include approximately 800,000 (8 lakh) .com and .net domain names.

The report further reveals that in the first quarter of 2009, an average of 2.4 million new '.com' and '.net' domain names were registered each month, and consequently the total number of '.com' and '.net' domain names grew to 92.4 million, representing 2 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008, and 9 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. The .com remained the most popular TLD category, followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net.

According to the report, the number of Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs) grew to 74.1 million domain names globally in the first quarter of 2009, up 4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008, and 18 percent up from the first quarter of 2008.